From the Federation of State Medical Boards:
The FSMB is closely monitoring troubling legislation that has been introduced in a number of states aimed at limiting state medical boards’ authority to act in the furtherance of public health and patient safety. If enacted, a number of bills would make it more difficult for licensing boards to discipline a licensee for spreading disinformation. The FSMB strongly opposes any effort to restrict a board’s authority to evaluate the standard of care and assess risk for patient harm.
Unless politicians obsessed with free speech intervene, physicians could be canceled, presumably, for saying that schools should stay open while marijuana and alcohol stores should be closed (as evidenced by California and Massachusetts public health experts, who follow the science at all times, #Science proves that marijuana and alcohol are “essential” while education is optional). Certainly we need a system where docs can be stripped of their ability to earn a living if they agree with the World Health Organization (#Science as of early June 2020) that masks for the general public are not effective (archive.org) and cite Peru, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia as examples.
Separately, a friend recently attended a cardiology continuing education class at a luxury resort hotel. COVID-19 is a public health emergency, of course, but not severe enough to prevent doctors from occupying $600/night rooms paid for by employers (well, ultimately by you via your health insurance dollars!) and gathering each morning to spread Omicron to each other. As the class was being held in a free state, only about 60 percent of the docs showed up to the meeting room in masks. Drs. Karen, Karen, and Karen had done enough complaining by the end of the morning session that signs and emails were posted demanding masking for the remainder of the event.
Related:
- non-COVID specialists in Maskachusetts might not have to work too hard for the next few months… “Elective Procedures Paused at Some Mass. Hospitals Amid COVID Spike, Bed Shortage” (NBC Boston): Gov. Charlie Baker has ordered Massachusetts hospitals with bed shortages to stop non-urgent procedures this week. “Mass General and the Brigham are running most days over 95% capacity. The state is trying to get us to 85% capacity to have that extra elasticity for additional patients, but that is a really big reach for us,” said Dr. Ron Walls, chief operating officer at Mass General Brigham. … As of Tuesday, more than 900 people statewide were hospitalized with COVID. “We’re seeing a pretty big resurgence of delta right now. Our numbers of inpatients in our Mass General Brigham system in the past three and a half, four weeks have almost doubled,” said Walls. [89% of people in Greater Boston, age 5+, are vaccinated.]
Sorry to ask a question I don’t know the answer to, but what would the occupancy rate be if MA had the # of beds it had 10 years ago? 20 years ago?
Eric: Good question. I did some searching. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690165/ says that Boston experienced 4.8 percent population growth 1996-2003 and simultaneously cut hospital beds by 5.1 percent. There were 10,685 hospital beds “in Boston” in 1996.
https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2012/07/Massachusetts-Should-Identify-and-Stabilize-All-needed-hospitals-20-May-99.pdf
says “The number of acute care beds in Massachusetts fell from 23,966 in 1970 to about
14,599 beds this year [1999], we estimate— a drop of 39.1 percent.”
A VA hospital executive told me that private hospitals don’t want to build Covid capacity because it isn’t profitable (1 or 2 surges per year and the rest of the time idle is not good from the MBA point of view).
In 95% fully vaccinated Nantucket cases are rising again. Any connection to this mask-denier event in November?
https://nypost.com/2021/11/28/biden-seen-flouting-mask-wearing-rule-at-nantucket-store/
Anon: Usually I blame the 1%, but in this case I will blame the 5%! If they had only followed the science by getting vaccinated, Nantucket wouldn’t have any Covid problems.
I’m torn. On the one hand, I want to call my politicians and get them to intervene to stop this from happening. And on the other hand, I want the state medical boards to go Full Orwell and start defrocking physicians for no ******g good reason, dozens at a time, so that this turns into a real battle royale and some Important People have to go to the mat, for once, in defense of unstupidity.
Why should the Little People start defending the Doctors? That’s what they have the AMA for, and if they’ve all got their heads so far up their collective rear end that they can’t see how onerous and stupid these rules are, it’s time for them to figure it out for themselves and fight the battle.
I feel the same way about higher education as well. For thirty years the go-along-get-along academics have been watching their universities being taken over by a vocal minority of Young Pioneer activists and because they don’t like rocking the boat and enjoy their nice vacations and their lifestyles, they haven’t been willing to stand up en masse at a faculty meeting and start throwing the Commies out the window.
Well, it’s time for them to start taking responsibility for their own moth-eaten and decrepit institutions, before they all wind up in the Dustbin of History. Camille Paglia tried it for a while back in the ’90s but even she succumbed, because she’s basically one of them, she just likes art. The rest of them have done it to themselves so they wouldn’t make waves or “look like a Republican.” Well, maybe when they lose their precious institutions to a bunch of Marxist idiots, they’ll wise up. Or are they all just waiting to die peacefully of old age without ever having fought for anything meaningful?
“Or are they all just waiting to die peacefully of old age without ever having fought for anything meaningful?” As the boomer booms ‘you gotta choose your battles man, that’s why we never fought any.’
Yes the boomers are waiting to die thinking they can stay ahead of their sins.
As to docs if I had to chose between a licensed and approved doc and a canceled doc I’d take the latter every time.
Whatever happened to the ‘always get a second opinion’ medical advice? That used to be common advice and has disappeared from collective consciousness.
For those who didn’t parse Alex’s allusion to Young Pioneers: that was Soviet organization for middle school kids doing the first level of communist indoctrination (the second step was Komsomol, Communist Youth Union, for high schoolers, higher education students etc, and finally, Communist Party membership). Pretty much all Soviet kids were Young Pioneers, and most became members of Komsomol. So, “young pioneer” when referring to an older student is basically a pejorative, a wide eyed earnest enthusiastic case of arrested development. Somebody so stupid so as to still believe in the fundamental goodness of official Soviet ideology.
FMSB statement sounds like coming from cold war era Soviet Politburo.
Yes, everything these days is “problematic”, “troubling”, “harmful”, etc. The apparatchiks have taken over.
Let’s perform a little #FactCheck. In October, the NYT heaped praise on Portugal:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/world/europe/portugal-vaccination-rate.html
“In Portugal, There Is Virtually No One Left to Vaccinate”
Now #Science itself tells us the Portugal is in the same (highest) risk category as Germany and France:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/noticescovid19
“Avoid travel to Portugal. If you must travel to Portugal, make sure you are fully vaccinated before travel.”
Anon: Thanks for that reminder of the predictive power of #Science. I like that the October 1 NYT article talks about how great it is that a military officer has taken over an important civilian function. Readers need to be reminded that they will never be safe until the military is deployed domestically.
———- some great parts
About 98 percent of all of those eligible for vaccines — meaning anyone over 12 — have been fully vaccinated, Admiral Gouveia e Melo said.
“We believe we have reached the point of group protection and nearly herd immunity,” he said. “Things look very good.”
On Friday, Portugal ended nearly all of its coronavirus restrictions. There has been a sharp drop in new cases, to about 650 a day, and vanishingly few deaths.
The same flood of misinformation about vaccines has filled the social media accounts of the Portuguese.
Standing 6 feet 3 inches, the admiral made it a point to wear only his combat uniform in his many public and television appearances as he sought to essentially draft the nation into one collective pandemic-fighting force.
“The first thing is to make this thing a war,” Admiral Gouveia e Melo said in an interview, recalling how he approached the job. “I use not only the language of war, but military language.”
Right now cases in Portugal are about 4,000 per day, i.e., up by a factor of 6X. Germany, which we are informed has been suffering from a plague of unvaccinated Deplorables, has seen cases rise over the same period… by a factor of 6X.
From Nov 25: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/portugal-reimposes-covid-19-restrictions-cases-rise-2021-11-25/
Portugal, which has one of the world’s highest rates of vaccination against COVID-19, announced it would reimpose restrictions to stop a surge in cases, ordering all passengers flying into the country to show a negative test certificate on arrival.
Costa also announced that those fully vaccinated must also present proof of a negative coronavirus test to enter nightclubs, bars, large events and care homes, and that the EU digital certificate would be required to stay in hotels, go to the gym, or dine indoors in restaurants.
————- https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/portugal-travel-covid-19/index.html
Portugal was in what the government called a State of Calamity, but the country then moved into a State of Contingency, easing restrictions in recognition of Portugal’s vaccine rollout. Now, Portugal has moved back to a State of Calamity, as cases appear to be on the rise.
What pannydemic is this? https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-birdemic-of-2020-had-zero.html
We are seeing an increase of deaths among vaccinated athletes but you aren’t supposed to notice that.
GB: Are you sure about that blogspot link? It cites to https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#how-many-people-die-and-how-many-are-born-each-year but as far as I can tell, the last year for which they have data is 2019 (i.e., 2020 is an extrapolation).
Even Eurostat, which should have a fairly easy time gathering data (not broken up into counties and states like in the U.S.) stops reporting total deaths as of 2019. See https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Mortality_and_life_expectancy_statistics#Number_of_deaths (“This article provides information relating to mortality in the European Union (EU) based on official statistics up to 2019 and when available including 2020.”)
(Also, a gender gap that we probably won’t hear politicians saying that they want to close: “In 2020, life expectancy for women is still higher than the life expectancy for men. With a gender gap of 5.5 years in 2019, newly born females in the EU should generally expect to outlive men.”)
So we’re in a situation in which the best minds of #Science and technocratic government cannot come up with a total deaths number for 2020, even in Europe where a corpse is tough to ignore, 11.5 months after 2020 ended. Yet the same scientists and government say that they will wage a successful war against an aerosol virus. So far it is cost Americans, in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars (not the sacrifice in young lives, of course), 2X what we spent on World War II, but victory is in sight and and no more than another $10 trillion away.
@Philg: Someone in Britain has died from Omicron, making it the first death attributed to Omicron.
“Boris Johnson said the death proves that the Omicron variant is no less lethal than its predecessors.” Actually, doesn’t it say that Omicron is 1/146000th as lethal as its predecessors, at least as of right now?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/britain-reports-worlds-first-confirmed-death-from-omicron-variant
Thus far, Britain has had 146 thousand deaths from all the other variants combined. So now the score is 1 Omicron, 146,000+ Others. This means that Omicron is “no less lethal.” In other news, Dr. Fauci now says that if we need an other boost after the booster boost, that’s just “something we’re going to have to deal with.” But he won’t know until the #Science develops.
https://thehill.com/news/administration/585462-fauci-if-it-becomes-necessary-to-get-yet-another-boost-then-well-just-have
Parse these two sentences, if you can:
““The third shot of an mRNA could not only do what we absolutely know it does, is it dramatically increased the level of protection, but from an immunological standpoint, it could very well increase the durability of protection,” Fauci said.
“You don’t know that, George, until you just follow it over a period of months,” he added.
So it COULD do what we ABSOLUTELY KNOW IT DOES except maybe it doesn’t, even though we ABSOLUTELY KNOW it does. It COULD, but we WON’T KNOW for a “period of months.”
People are putting this person on television and asking him for answers.
Some steroids weaken immunity, this could be culprit for “athletes” deaths.