Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I'm the first to say the dems need a deeper, younger bench. But Biden was the best person available, without a doubt. The problem is the GOP refuses to cut ties with the criminal. Can't risk that sort of self-reflection when there's a chance to take back the House by slim margin.

 

Because one party, generally speaking, keeps its loony edge in the margins instead of electing them to national office. The left’s loony edge is on Twitter. The right’s loony edge was in the White House and is currently in Congress.

 

The GOP was full-throatedly in support of reopening schools. Democrats supported the grunt work that made it feasible to eventually open schools in a responsible fashion that mitigated risk.

Nothing about what the GOP “full-throatedly” supported during the worst of the pandemic impresses me. Any spoiled child can point to the toy catalog and cry “gimmie!”

 

Solid work, but Paul Newberry still holds the house cup for best Dooley interpretation.

 

I don't think that Biden is a particularly good leader. I think he is indecisive at times and thinks in clichés.

But as a candidate he was and is very vanilla. 52% of the population actively disliked the orange flavored candidate and were OK with a vanilla candidate. So it worked. It also looks like he is going to be only the second President of the last four to have his party retain control of at least one branch of Congress. Only Bush accomplished that feat but only by whipping the country into war fever and wrapping himself in the flag.

Biden only has favorability ratings in the 40's, in part because a lot of Dems are like me and don't think Biden is particularly but look at the Republicans and will vote vanilla.

 

Not a lot I disagree with here.

Biden has gotten a lot more of his agenda through that I thought was possible, considering the thin margins in the House and Senate. I think he deserves some credit for that. There are legislative wins for Dems to campaign on in the midterms. That was not an easy feat.

That, combined with the deeply unpopular SCOTUS overreach on Roe, gas prices and inflation going in the right direction and the threat of the orange menace could make for happy Dem midterms. Along with a handful of deeply shitty GOP Senate candidates knighted by the orange menace.

 

GOP kept the Senate under Trump.

 

Except we could see what was coming. We saw early numbers. trump knew early.

 

Sosorry to read that. I hope you recover quicly.

I'm not.

 

And a disturbing number of state legislatures, the laboratories of viral infections to democracy.

 

"Game-changer" Paxlovid turns into pandemic enigma

The intrigue: There's growing concern about the link between Pfizer's antiviral pill and COVID rebound, in which patients test positive or have symptoms days after a course of the drug is completed. President Biden, First Lady Jill Biden and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci have each relapsed.

• The FDA has asked Pfizer to investigate whether a second five-day course of the drug will prevent the virus from returning.
• Pfizer executives in May suggested patients who can't clear the virus with the first course should take more, Bloomberg reported.

The big picture: Paxlovid use surged over the summer, with as many as one-third of reported coronavirus cases treated with the drug.

• But uncertainty over what's causing the relapses, and whether the drug helps younger patients, is making some people wary of taking the treatment, physicians say.
• At least part of the problem is that people are not routinely tested after taking Paxlovid, which makes it hard to establish how often rebound happens or why the virus lingers in some people, Leana Wen, an emergency physician and a professor at George Washington University, told CNN.
• A large study of more than 109,000 people in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded the drug significantly reduced hospitalizations and deaths among patients aged 65 and older but that there was no evidence of benefit in younger adults.
• The prospect of reinfection shouldn't discourage older or high-risk patients from taking the pills, said Yale infectious diseases specialist Scott Roberts.
• "Rebound is almost always more mild than initial course," Roberts told Axios.
• Paxlovid could have the added benefit of warding off long COVID, or symptoms that linger beyond the first 30 days after testing positive, and studies to determine this are underway.

But availability of the drug could change before clear answers emerge.

• The Biden administration has only bought enough pills to supply Paxlovid through the middle of next year, after which it will transition to the commercial market, HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Dawn O'Connell wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

Between the lines: COVID rebound has also been observed in people who have not taken Paxlovid, and some experts believe it might be a natural course of the infection to see symptoms ebb, then return.

• COVID's course "is not a purely linear process; it waxes and wanes a little bit," said Jonathan Li, a Harvard Medical School researcher and co-author of a pre-print that found high levels of rebound in people who hadn't been treated with the drug.

State of play: The CDC recommends Paxlovid for those over the age of 50, and for those with medical conditions like lung or heart disease that makes them high-risk, although the drug's emergency authorization covers anyone 12 years old and up.

• Research in Clinical Infectious Diseases found the drug remains effective for vaccinated people who contract COVID-19, reducing emergency room visits by lowering the risk of complications like lower respiratory tract infection and cardiac arrhythmia.
• Beyond the Pfizer study requested by the FDA, a clinical trial of immunocompromised people is evaluating if Paxlovid should be used for five, 10 or 15 days.

 

I’m not saying you have to be “impressed.” It was a societal emergency that was never treated as such.

We universally failed our children. And we’ll be cleaning up the mess for a generation.