Vaccinations Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

September 21, 2020

White House infects Covid-19 battle with yet more potent doses of politics

As the November elections draw near, let’s not lose sight of the flurry of developments in response to the politicization of the pandemic and the assaults by the Trump administration on medical science. Among them:

Vaccine makers disclosed secret details about their plans to test the safety and effectiveness of a coronavirus inoculation on tens of thousands of Americans.
Leading medical experts stepped to the fore again to insist that clinical trials of the prospective shot would not be meddled with by politicians, and the vaccine would be unlikely to become available to the public before Nov. 3.

September 15, 2020

With speeding vaccine clinical trials, a pause that may prove reassuring

by Patrick A. Malone

The “warp speed” race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine has gotten hit with a yellow flag.

It could be a good thing that the product’s makers — Oxford University and AstraZeneca — followed medical-scientific protocols and paused their Phase III clinical trial due to a participant’s unexplained illness.

Officially, the company offered spare information about the occurrence, especially because it affects the private medical information of a single individual.

September 13, 2020

A viral confession: ‘This is deadly stuff … I wanted to always play it down.’

by Patrick A. Malone

Some fictional scenarios to contemplate:

What would happen to a military leader who was briefed and admitted to knowing of severe threats but downplayed them, resulting over a few months to the United States seeing its Indo-Pacific and European Commands wiped out — combined losses of roughly 180,000 in U.S. forces?
How would the governor of Maryland be treated if he was told of a public works problem but belittled it and in less than a year the cities of Columbia, Bethesda, and Annapolis and all the people in them were destroyed?

September 8, 2020

Federal pandemic response marked by yet more uproars and confusion

by Patrick A. Malone

The Trump Administration — yet again — has sowed confusion, frustration, and anger over the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, creating potentially harmful credibility issues for a prospective coronavirus vaccine, the scientific concept of “herd immunity,” a possible blood-based treatment for the illness, as well as testing, contact tracing, and quarantines for the disease.

The White House follies would be considered bad farce, save for the reality that the U.S. death toll races toward 200,000 and infections have skyrocketed past 6 million. The U.S. has 22 percent of the world’s Covid death toll, but only 4 percent of the world’s population.

With schools reopening, infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among children are on the rise.

August 31, 2020

As White House gets its way, CDC and FDA chiefs shred their agencies’ credibility

by Patrick A. Malone

What the White House wants, it apparently will get — even if that hangs out to dry the prized nonpartisan reputations of the Federal Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The political meddling and leadership errors at two of the nation’s premier health agencies, critics say, will have disconcerting effects on the nation’s well-being, notably on science- and evidence-based efforts to combat the toll of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Those numbers keep soaring and changing almost as fast as they can be typed: 180,000-plus Americans have been killed by novel coronavirus, which also has infected more than 5.9 million of us in a little more than half a year.

August 28, 2020

Pandemic prompts more focus on junk foods, shots, domestic abuse, booze

by Patrick A. Malone

Stepped up vaccinations, bans on junk food for kids, worries about domestic abuse and booze consumption by men — yes, these seemingly disparate things have something in common. They’re all getting heightened attention from experts due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Let’s start with a grito (a whoop) for the leyes antichatarra or anti-junk food laws targeting youngsters and spreading across states in Mexico. The laws take aim at high calorie, low nutritional value foods and drinks, the Washington Post reported:

“[They would prohibit the sale of] chips, candy, soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages to children under 18, putting these foods in the same category as cigarettes and alcohol. The law[s establish] fines, store closures and jail time for repeat offenders. The ban also applies to vending machines in schools.”

August 23, 2020

Are kids wrong in describing the pandemic school chaos as a ‘cluster …’ ?

by Patrick A. Malone

If the young are the nation’s future, they are getting a sorry eyeful now of how not to deal with widespread death and disease, uncertainty, and inequity. What will kids say years from now about how parents and politicians handled young folks’ schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic?

The student journalists at the University of North Carolina (photo, right) captured in one vulgar term the shambolic response, labeling it a “cluster—” you-know-what.

That reaction summarized the anger and frustration as leading institutions of higher education, including UNC and Notre Dame re-opened, got thousands of young people sort of settled in, and then abruptly shut down, sending them packing and switching to online learning. The universities did so after coronavirus cases on campus exploded.

August 17, 2020

Big Pharma is laying out big cash to try to paint election results red

by Patrick A. Malone

Big Pharma won’t be waiting for the nation’s two major political parties to hit the broadcast airwaves with their presidential nominating conventions to see which candidates will best benefit the profit-ravenous drug industry.

The big pill merchants already have pulled out their corporate checkbooks and rained millions of dollars of donations onto politicians across the country, mostly Republicans but also Democrats, according to Stat, the online science and medicine news site.

To no one’s surprise, the industry cash is going heavily to try to prevent Democrats, who already control the U.S. House, from seizing the U.S. Senate, and maybe the White House, too, Stat reported, based on its scrutiny of political spending by “23 of the biggest drug makers and the two major trade associations: PhRMA and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, known as BIO.”

August 14, 2020

U.S. showered sketchy nursing homes with millions in Covid emergency aid

by Patrick A. Malone

In response to the shattering harms of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sought to shore up the U.S. health care system with billions of dollars in emergency aid. But the federal agency that helps to oversee the institutional care for the elderly, sick, and injured performed poorly as a steward of taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

The Health and Human Services department, instead, shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars, “no strings attached,” to dubious owners or operators of facilities nationwide. These “for-profit nursing home providers … have faced accusations of Medicare fraud and kickbacks, labor violations or widespread failures in patient care,” the Washington Post reported.

The newspaper said its analysis of HHS allocations of big sums in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or Cares Act, also showed that:

August 11, 2020

As world takes note of historic nuclear horrors, U.S. Covid carnage surges on

by Patrick A. Malone

Last week the world took note with appropriate solemnity a terrible historic moment: The first military use of nuclear weapons, with explosions 75 years ago of bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The resulting carnage — which the United States said was needed to end the horrors of World War II, especially by averting a bloody land conquest of Japan — has been seared into the global consciousness ever since, especially with the remarkable writing and reporting of author John Hersey.

The exact toll of the bombings of Hiroshima (a famous site shown above) and Nagasaki has eluded historians and other experts because of multiple factors, including: the scale of destruction, the chaos that ensued, and the uncertainty of the population and infrastructure that existed in the already war-torn cities. Still, by many estimates, tens of thousands died immediately — at least 135,000 in Hiroshima and 64,000 in Nagasaki.