How about zero doses for anyone who wants zero doses, Dr. Prasad? I, for one, want zero doses. I have yet to see a realistic assessment of vaccine side effects that would allow me to make an informed decision about the risks/benefits, the long-term effects of vaccination are unknown, and it seems likely that all of this has been hijacked for political purposes that few of us understand.
It's time for politicians...and doctors with opinions dependent upon the judgment of their peers (no offense)...to trust the unwashed masses, who are far better informed than they might imagine, to make their own decisions.
Omicron is weak. Therefore, unless one or more far more virulent variants take over soon, the pandemic is over. The End.
I share so many of your Substacks and Tweets! Thank you for analyzing all the latest studies. I assure you that most people — many highly educated — who are my friends and acquaintances have no idea about the state of things. You are covering the health news that main stream media in the United States often fails to cover.
We're 2 years into this, so the time to panic is over and the time to be smart is now. In my province (Alberta, Canada) we've just announced no more vax passport system (businesses, dining, etc). Continued use is at local discretion. So now we have a large million-person city (redneck Calgary) forgoing this measure, and a comparative city (Peoples Republic of Edmonton ;-) ) that is moving to keep it.
A perfect A/B test. OK, not perfect, but it's something.
Also, dissemination of European policies on vaccination/masking of children.
In addition, I think the Ottawa truckers and the growing offshoots are going to curb much of the enthusiasm for onerous restrictions and mandates, when the case numbers rise (and have already contributed to blue-state mask reversals).
What I find odd is the rush to N95 advisories all of a sudden
Germany & Austria have had FFP2 (EU version of N95) mandates for ages, and compliance is extremely high. In Germany, I've been stopped at a train station and told to change my mask (I had a surgical one on). I was refused service at a gas station because I had the wrong mask on.
Furthermore, Germany has what is known as "2g+" which only allows vaccinated OR recovered AND with a negative pcr test to participate in society. Even outdoor christmas markets had uniformed guards who were checking documents and ID
Their pandemic curve is much the same as anywhere else
This has been a 2 year war against SARS-COV-2. We were able to get vaccines out to save many lives, but the virus did what it was always going to do - spread.
There is excellent data from Germany (esp. Bavaria) showing ZERO value to N95 masks. The science research on actual use (not some lab silliness) shows the same -- all masking is virtually useless against respiratory viruses except P100 with viral filters -- all of which are ported, incidentally. I have videos from my lab from freshly, professionally fitted N95 masks that show substantial two-way leakage from the get go. And the surgical masks leak like sieves. Masking was the first fraud and led to the "self-permission" to just foist more on the "unsuspecting" masses. I have spent my life trying to improve the relationship between the practice of medicine and improving health -- all shot to hell now. Am I mad? You bet. But I still do the best for my patients -- not too many other choices. I now see that DHS has pegged me (and EVERYONE on this blog, including Vinay) as a terrorist, so you may not see my comments much longer -- but I shall terrorize them all from the grave if so.
Ian Miller does the best job of showing the silliness of masks. (I recommend buying his data-filled book, Unmasked, if you want to learn all about this.
Here is a good masks-are-useless summary (with many graphs) by him:
And here is a complete refutation of the recent CDC "masks work!" article in MMWR (complete dross -- I review articles and would have sent this back as not worthy of review, much less publication) which contains an excellent illustration of the N95 mask data from Bavaria
While the invention of mRNA vaccines might be a great technical breakthrough, their long term side effects need a lot more study and analyses. So, for the moment, these do not seem appropriate for population use. We do need much more research on what has proved effective in reducing how serious a covid infection becomes. Vitamin D is an obvious measure useful against most respiratory infections. Are there other steps available to ward off infection as mentioned by many of the banned physicians? The various mitigations to avoid infection seem to have worked somewhat but we really can't quantify them well; suitable population assessments should help provide some of those data. Meanwhile the politicians need to take responsibility for their choices. They like to duck noting they relied on quite imperfect science but the economic consequences are theirs alone. They are supposed to balance those various factors.
One fact really stands out, we do the public great disservice by making any of our declarations political. We have quite enough wedge issues and public health ought not to be one of them. I refused to criticize my Governor for what I thought were excessive caution. As time went on the evidence arrived to suggest the polices weren't working, yet the policy continued because it became part of the politics. So blue states have been horribly late in relaxing restrictions and the red states became more open with a recovering economy. This should not have happened and it smacks of politics, not science.
Don’t think those who are calling for the end of masking are “making things up.” The burden is on the proponents, particularly when force/coercion is involved, and they have not met their burden.
Masks don't work! The Danish showed this, and we had 30 or 40 years of studies with influenza showing that MASKS DON'T WORK! WHY CAN'T YOU GET THAT THOUGH YOUR HEADS? MASKS DON'T WORK! MASKS ON KIDS ARE CHILD-ABUSE! ROCHELLE WALENSKY IS A MASS MURDERER OF CHILDREN.
AND NPIs are dubious at best. The studies have been *at best* equivocal. They are utterly unjustifiable when the negatives are considered!
I think the solution is to hang everyone who advocates "Public Health". There is no "Public". It can't be healthy or otherwise. There is only the health of individuals, and "Public Health" had destroyed that in huge numbers.
I’d like your opinion about border closures: were they helpful, economically harmful, to be opened and then travel closed with each relapse? I’m personally sick of paying exorbitantly high PCR tests while traveling and anxiously impacting plans with risks of being forcefully quarantined.
Of course COVID will last forever. It will join its handful of other coronavirus brethren that have been responsible for around a third of the colds you have gotten through your life.
What a failure of our science beaurocrats to not design and implement cluster RCT's on masking. Michael Lewis' critique of CDC in The Premonition spot on. More afraid of failure that can be directly traced yet they fail to truly follow science jointly everyday regarding Covid.
Could you present some data comparing covid risk to other risks we accept (including flu, but isn’t it more contagious than flu)? I wish this was more clearly laid out in messaging.
I’d also love to see a post on recommendations for immunocompromised people. This is a lingering conflict I have, about how responsible we as a society should be to protect vulnerable and disabled folks. Though I understand that if we say we should do things to protect them from covid, then we also have to say we should have been doing them for flu.
Vox has an excellent table for those under 18 (since, to escape liability, Pfizer is trying to get the jab approved for infants although, under intense scrutiny, they retreated today -- so they still may be sued...fingers crossed).
As this table clearly shows, flu has more deaths in this group than COVID, and firearms, drowning, heart disease and motor vehicle accidents make the COVID deaths just a blip.
In fact, under age 60, by any measure, unless you are morbidly obese, COVID is NOT an appreciable risk. Once the vaccines were shown to be leaky (that is, they do not protect against transmission or infection) there was not a reason in the world for anyone under 60 without complicating conditions to take them.
Thanks so much for this article, very helpful and I will be sharing! How do we know though that the risk of covid is clearly less than flu (which I’ve been hearing and want to believe)? In this table, it looks like there are slightly fewer deaths from covid than flu, but we’ve been practicing more mitigation than with flu, and it doesn’t include data from omicron wave, where presumably there was a lot more transmission. Still, it is clearly less deadly than car accidents.
Do you mean that there is no reason people under 60 should get vaccinated? But it still provides benefit against severe illness and death, so why not lower the risk if we can? Plus, hopefully we will one day age past 60.
Naomi, This would all be true if there were no risks to the vaccine. But there are substantial risks (watch the news/whistleblowers over the next few weeks) and most of those risks are in those under 30. Further, this shot has only been tested/examined for ONE YEAR. Most vaccines (I mean the ones that actually work as vaccines, not as short term therapeutics) get 10 years of testing to make sure there are no untoward effects before they are released. We have actually no idea what the untoward effects are, but more reactions have been posted about this shot in the last year than about all shots for all diseases since recording began...let that sink in for a while.
In fact, the mortality rate for those under 70 is 0.05%. This is less than the flu and less than most things about which we worry. Recall that the average age of death from COVID is still in excess of 80. Despite the deceptive and inflammatory press, COVID is a disease of old, fat, comorbid people.
Fiona Havers from CDC (I know the source is contaminated, but it will be the "worst possible" set of data) noted the following at the FDA hearing in October on extending the shot to five year olds:
"-- There have been around 1.9 million COVID cases reported in the 5-11 age group.
-- Between January 1, 2020 and October 16, 2021, only 94 children ages 5-11 have died of COVID, which is 0.00012 percent of the 723,880 total U.S. COVID deaths through the week ending Oct. 16, 2021; and it is 17.34 percent of the 542 children ages 0-17 who have died of COVID since the pandemic began."
A death rate of 0.00012 percent is effectively zero. And virtually every one of those affected had significant morbidities already.
The most immediate cause for concern is myocarditis/pericarditis which it is now generally acknowledged is substantially increased (Israeli data says >100x) in males under 25.
The counterpoint is "well, COVID is bad, too", but as noted above, virtually no children other than those with other extensive and already life-threatening morbidities die from COVID, and even those numbers are tiny.
Look at it from another risk viewpoint. You have some risk of being hit by a meteor every night when you go to bed. You would clearly decrease that risk some if you wore a certified motorcycle helmet to bed every night. But the risk is infinitesimal and the remediation has its own issues. So you do not. Less ridiculously, you have a much, much higher risk as a child of dying in an automobile accident than from COVID. By that logic, we should put all children into body armor before letting them into a car -- or ban them from ever riding in a car at all.
We make all kinds of risk decisions every day -- in my experience, the COVID decisions, especially with regard to children, are so flawed as to be litigable and I hope they are. The long term negative consequences of what has been done will forever dwarf the infinitesimal potential one or two cases of COVID death that might have been prevented.
that makes sense regarding children. i don't have children so i was thinking more about adults (i'm in my 40s). from the vox article you linked, it looks like the mortality rate is above 0.05% for ages 30+. anyway, i wouldn't say there's "not a reason in the world" for these people to get vaccinated, but i agree it's most important for the groups you mention, and others the decision may be less clear and make their own assessment. i do wish the mortality rate (IFR? CFR?) was more easily publicized - as a non-scientist, it feels like a lot of work to dig up this information.
Naomi, Completely agree. For competent adults, health decisions should be made (at least in my opinion) between a practitioner who has the patient's best interests as their primary driver and the patient. The patient is the one who has to live with it all, so it should always be, fundamentally, their decision. It is why some of the things that have happened (ivermectin as an example -- a generally harmless and long approved, Nobel prize winning drug with a very forgiving side-effect profile for which tens of millions of doses have been given -- if a doctor and a patient want to try it, that is their decision...not some paternalistic (and generally wrong) governmental or "professional" body) cause me such distress.
Having said that, I advise my male patients under 30 to not touch the vaccine, and all of my patients 30-50 that I wouldn't if I were they but here are the death rates so you decide. If you are in your early 40's, the survival rate from COVID is 99.84%. It is slightly less than that if you are in your late 40's.
Driving with body armor on will likely have more of an impact on your incipient death than the vaccine given these numbers...just sayin. But, again, it is your decision to make and it should be.
As I recall during my chemo treatment, I was immunocompromised. Accordingly, I took some rather extreme measures to avoid infections of any kind. Hospitals did make great effort to shield those types patients as well. As far as "recommendations for immunocompromised people" the same precautions apply. Making the public responsible is impossible. It would have been helpful to have access to secure transport for necessary travel. Equally, delivery services for necessities would have been helpful. The issue remains with who pays for these services which may need to be means tested.
I completely agree. Immunocompromised is a different situation and needs to be treated as such. We often use reverse barrier to protect such patients. But they needed the same protection before COVID and should have had it before, during, and after. (When you have zero white blood cells, you are at enormous risk.) That needs an "all hands" approach and some of the suggestions you have I have made more than once.
But few focus on immunocompromised patients. They are a completely a different case from the "relatively normal" under 60 year old. In fact, your note underscores the resource problem introduces when conflating the two. As the GBR authors pointed out, resources should be spent on the vulnerable -- the worried well did not and do not need them.
I appreciate the discussion. What I’m thinking about is calls from disability justice community to not accept disabled/chronically ill people as collateral damage for the status quo. I’m not clear what the proposed solutions are, but I do recognize I have privilege in being young and healthy so I’m trying to consider their perspectives. Im sure most can agree to the vulnerable needing more resources. And access to healthcare is such a huge issue.
How about zero doses for anyone who wants zero doses, Dr. Prasad? I, for one, want zero doses. I have yet to see a realistic assessment of vaccine side effects that would allow me to make an informed decision about the risks/benefits, the long-term effects of vaccination are unknown, and it seems likely that all of this has been hijacked for political purposes that few of us understand.
It's time for politicians...and doctors with opinions dependent upon the judgment of their peers (no offense)...to trust the unwashed masses, who are far better informed than they might imagine, to make their own decisions.
Omicron is weak. Therefore, unless one or more far more virulent variants take over soon, the pandemic is over. The End.
I share so many of your Substacks and Tweets! Thank you for analyzing all the latest studies. I assure you that most people — many highly educated — who are my friends and acquaintances have no idea about the state of things. You are covering the health news that main stream media in the United States often fails to cover.
We're 2 years into this, so the time to panic is over and the time to be smart is now. In my province (Alberta, Canada) we've just announced no more vax passport system (businesses, dining, etc). Continued use is at local discretion. So now we have a large million-person city (redneck Calgary) forgoing this measure, and a comparative city (Peoples Republic of Edmonton ;-) ) that is moving to keep it.
A perfect A/B test. OK, not perfect, but it's something.
Hopefully with increasing natural immunity plus vaccinations, we won’t have another major surge.
Widespread dissemination of "One-way masking" -- such as https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/01/does-it-help-wear-mask-if-no-one-else/621177/ -- is a good starting point for responding to panic.
Also, dissemination of European policies on vaccination/masking of children.
In addition, I think the Ottawa truckers and the growing offshoots are going to curb much of the enthusiasm for onerous restrictions and mandates, when the case numbers rise (and have already contributed to blue-state mask reversals).
Finally, NYC Mayor Adams is creating a model for promotion of healthy diets and lifestyles to reduce risk factors for Covid, as well as most diseases: https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/063-22/mayor-adams-nyc-health-hospitals-expand-access-lifestyle-medicine-services-city-wide?fbclid=IwAR2t4AI7xF6WfJ6cy2z3sqHpScMThfFOtyURQmM7myEWkA4wxFvoixWYURc#/0
Dr V,
What I find odd is the rush to N95 advisories all of a sudden
Germany & Austria have had FFP2 (EU version of N95) mandates for ages, and compliance is extremely high. In Germany, I've been stopped at a train station and told to change my mask (I had a surgical one on). I was refused service at a gas station because I had the wrong mask on.
Furthermore, Germany has what is known as "2g+" which only allows vaccinated OR recovered AND with a negative pcr test to participate in society. Even outdoor christmas markets had uniformed guards who were checking documents and ID
Their pandemic curve is much the same as anywhere else
This has been a 2 year war against SARS-COV-2. We were able to get vaccines out to save many lives, but the virus did what it was always going to do - spread.
Omicron, the Slayer of mandates
There is excellent data from Germany (esp. Bavaria) showing ZERO value to N95 masks. The science research on actual use (not some lab silliness) shows the same -- all masking is virtually useless against respiratory viruses except P100 with viral filters -- all of which are ported, incidentally. I have videos from my lab from freshly, professionally fitted N95 masks that show substantial two-way leakage from the get go. And the surgical masks leak like sieves. Masking was the first fraud and led to the "self-permission" to just foist more on the "unsuspecting" masses. I have spent my life trying to improve the relationship between the practice of medicine and improving health -- all shot to hell now. Am I mad? You bet. But I still do the best for my patients -- not too many other choices. I now see that DHS has pegged me (and EVERYONE on this blog, including Vinay) as a terrorist, so you may not see my comments much longer -- but I shall terrorize them all from the grave if so.
Could you link this Germany data?
That seems to conflict tho with suggesting immunocompromised to wear N95’s: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/01/does-it-help-wear-mask-if-no-one-else/621177/
It frustrates me how hard it seems to figure out what’s really true.
Ian Miller does the best job of showing the silliness of masks. (I recommend buying his data-filled book, Unmasked, if you want to learn all about this.
Here is a good masks-are-useless summary (with many graphs) by him:
https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are
And here is a complete refutation of the recent CDC "masks work!" article in MMWR (complete dross -- I review articles and would have sent this back as not worthy of review, much less publication) which contains an excellent illustration of the N95 mask data from Bavaria
https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/the-cdcs-latest-study-on-masks-is
Enjoy and if this appeals to you, so will his $19 book.
While the invention of mRNA vaccines might be a great technical breakthrough, their long term side effects need a lot more study and analyses. So, for the moment, these do not seem appropriate for population use. We do need much more research on what has proved effective in reducing how serious a covid infection becomes. Vitamin D is an obvious measure useful against most respiratory infections. Are there other steps available to ward off infection as mentioned by many of the banned physicians? The various mitigations to avoid infection seem to have worked somewhat but we really can't quantify them well; suitable population assessments should help provide some of those data. Meanwhile the politicians need to take responsibility for their choices. They like to duck noting they relied on quite imperfect science but the economic consequences are theirs alone. They are supposed to balance those various factors.
One fact really stands out, we do the public great disservice by making any of our declarations political. We have quite enough wedge issues and public health ought not to be one of them. I refused to criticize my Governor for what I thought were excessive caution. As time went on the evidence arrived to suggest the polices weren't working, yet the policy continued because it became part of the politics. So blue states have been horribly late in relaxing restrictions and the red states became more open with a recovering economy. This should not have happened and it smacks of politics, not science.
Don’t think those who are calling for the end of masking are “making things up.” The burden is on the proponents, particularly when force/coercion is involved, and they have not met their burden.
Masks don't work! The Danish showed this, and we had 30 or 40 years of studies with influenza showing that MASKS DON'T WORK! WHY CAN'T YOU GET THAT THOUGH YOUR HEADS? MASKS DON'T WORK! MASKS ON KIDS ARE CHILD-ABUSE! ROCHELLE WALENSKY IS A MASS MURDERER OF CHILDREN.
AND NPIs are dubious at best. The studies have been *at best* equivocal. They are utterly unjustifiable when the negatives are considered!
I think the solution is to hang everyone who advocates "Public Health". There is no "Public". It can't be healthy or otherwise. There is only the health of individuals, and "Public Health" had destroyed that in huge numbers.
I’d like your opinion about border closures: were they helpful, economically harmful, to be opened and then travel closed with each relapse? I’m personally sick of paying exorbitantly high PCR tests while traveling and anxiously impacting plans with risks of being forcefully quarantined.
What do you think of the much higher case rates in the boosted compared to unvaccinated in the UK? See the UKHSA weekly reports for the numbers.
It seems a bit strange and if the boosters aren't providing much protection against reinfection, maybe covid will last forever?
Of course COVID will last forever. It will join its handful of other coronavirus brethren that have been responsible for around a third of the colds you have gotten through your life.
What a failure of our science beaurocrats to not design and implement cluster RCT's on masking. Michael Lewis' critique of CDC in The Premonition spot on. More afraid of failure that can be directly traced yet they fail to truly follow science jointly everyday regarding Covid.
Thanks for laying this out so clearly.
Could you present some data comparing covid risk to other risks we accept (including flu, but isn’t it more contagious than flu)? I wish this was more clearly laid out in messaging.
I’d also love to see a post on recommendations for immunocompromised people. This is a lingering conflict I have, about how responsible we as a society should be to protect vulnerable and disabled folks. Though I understand that if we say we should do things to protect them from covid, then we also have to say we should have been doing them for flu.
Vox has an excellent table for those under 18 (since, to escape liability, Pfizer is trying to get the jab approved for infants although, under intense scrutiny, they retreated today -- so they still may be sued...fingers crossed).
https://www.vox.com/22699019/covid-19-children-kids-risk-hospitalization-death
As this table clearly shows, flu has more deaths in this group than COVID, and firearms, drowning, heart disease and motor vehicle accidents make the COVID deaths just a blip.
In fact, under age 60, by any measure, unless you are morbidly obese, COVID is NOT an appreciable risk. Once the vaccines were shown to be leaky (that is, they do not protect against transmission or infection) there was not a reason in the world for anyone under 60 without complicating conditions to take them.
Thanks so much for this article, very helpful and I will be sharing! How do we know though that the risk of covid is clearly less than flu (which I’ve been hearing and want to believe)? In this table, it looks like there are slightly fewer deaths from covid than flu, but we’ve been practicing more mitigation than with flu, and it doesn’t include data from omicron wave, where presumably there was a lot more transmission. Still, it is clearly less deadly than car accidents.
Do you mean that there is no reason people under 60 should get vaccinated? But it still provides benefit against severe illness and death, so why not lower the risk if we can? Plus, hopefully we will one day age past 60.
Naomi, This would all be true if there were no risks to the vaccine. But there are substantial risks (watch the news/whistleblowers over the next few weeks) and most of those risks are in those under 30. Further, this shot has only been tested/examined for ONE YEAR. Most vaccines (I mean the ones that actually work as vaccines, not as short term therapeutics) get 10 years of testing to make sure there are no untoward effects before they are released. We have actually no idea what the untoward effects are, but more reactions have been posted about this shot in the last year than about all shots for all diseases since recording began...let that sink in for a while.
In fact, the mortality rate for those under 70 is 0.05%. This is less than the flu and less than most things about which we worry. Recall that the average age of death from COVID is still in excess of 80. Despite the deceptive and inflammatory press, COVID is a disease of old, fat, comorbid people.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v3
Fiona Havers from CDC (I know the source is contaminated, but it will be the "worst possible" set of data) noted the following at the FDA hearing in October on extending the shot to five year olds:
"-- There have been around 1.9 million COVID cases reported in the 5-11 age group.
-- Between January 1, 2020 and October 16, 2021, only 94 children ages 5-11 have died of COVID, which is 0.00012 percent of the 723,880 total U.S. COVID deaths through the week ending Oct. 16, 2021; and it is 17.34 percent of the 542 children ages 0-17 who have died of COVID since the pandemic began."
A death rate of 0.00012 percent is effectively zero. And virtually every one of those affected had significant morbidities already.
The most immediate cause for concern is myocarditis/pericarditis which it is now generally acknowledged is substantially increased (Israeli data says >100x) in males under 25.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8272967/
The counterpoint is "well, COVID is bad, too", but as noted above, virtually no children other than those with other extensive and already life-threatening morbidities die from COVID, and even those numbers are tiny.
Look at it from another risk viewpoint. You have some risk of being hit by a meteor every night when you go to bed. You would clearly decrease that risk some if you wore a certified motorcycle helmet to bed every night. But the risk is infinitesimal and the remediation has its own issues. So you do not. Less ridiculously, you have a much, much higher risk as a child of dying in an automobile accident than from COVID. By that logic, we should put all children into body armor before letting them into a car -- or ban them from ever riding in a car at all.
We make all kinds of risk decisions every day -- in my experience, the COVID decisions, especially with regard to children, are so flawed as to be litigable and I hope they are. The long term negative consequences of what has been done will forever dwarf the infinitesimal potential one or two cases of COVID death that might have been prevented.
that makes sense regarding children. i don't have children so i was thinking more about adults (i'm in my 40s). from the vox article you linked, it looks like the mortality rate is above 0.05% for ages 30+. anyway, i wouldn't say there's "not a reason in the world" for these people to get vaccinated, but i agree it's most important for the groups you mention, and others the decision may be less clear and make their own assessment. i do wish the mortality rate (IFR? CFR?) was more easily publicized - as a non-scientist, it feels like a lot of work to dig up this information.
Naomi, Completely agree. For competent adults, health decisions should be made (at least in my opinion) between a practitioner who has the patient's best interests as their primary driver and the patient. The patient is the one who has to live with it all, so it should always be, fundamentally, their decision. It is why some of the things that have happened (ivermectin as an example -- a generally harmless and long approved, Nobel prize winning drug with a very forgiving side-effect profile for which tens of millions of doses have been given -- if a doctor and a patient want to try it, that is their decision...not some paternalistic (and generally wrong) governmental or "professional" body) cause me such distress.
Having said that, I advise my male patients under 30 to not touch the vaccine, and all of my patients 30-50 that I wouldn't if I were they but here are the death rates so you decide. If you are in your early 40's, the survival rate from COVID is 99.84%. It is slightly less than that if you are in your late 40's.
https://decivitate.substack.com/p/what-are-your-covid-odds
Driving with body armor on will likely have more of an impact on your incipient death than the vaccine given these numbers...just sayin. But, again, it is your decision to make and it should be.
As I recall during my chemo treatment, I was immunocompromised. Accordingly, I took some rather extreme measures to avoid infections of any kind. Hospitals did make great effort to shield those types patients as well. As far as "recommendations for immunocompromised people" the same precautions apply. Making the public responsible is impossible. It would have been helpful to have access to secure transport for necessary travel. Equally, delivery services for necessities would have been helpful. The issue remains with who pays for these services which may need to be means tested.
I completely agree. Immunocompromised is a different situation and needs to be treated as such. We often use reverse barrier to protect such patients. But they needed the same protection before COVID and should have had it before, during, and after. (When you have zero white blood cells, you are at enormous risk.) That needs an "all hands" approach and some of the suggestions you have I have made more than once.
But few focus on immunocompromised patients. They are a completely a different case from the "relatively normal" under 60 year old. In fact, your note underscores the resource problem introduces when conflating the two. As the GBR authors pointed out, resources should be spent on the vulnerable -- the worried well did not and do not need them.
I appreciate the discussion. What I’m thinking about is calls from disability justice community to not accept disabled/chronically ill people as collateral damage for the status quo. I’m not clear what the proposed solutions are, but I do recognize I have privilege in being young and healthy so I’m trying to consider their perspectives. Im sure most can agree to the vulnerable needing more resources. And access to healthcare is such a huge issue.
Your best writing to date.