My Virtual Reading Room

Opinion: Pro-lifers, RIP. The pro-death movement is born.

...Friday’s crowd invoked the mantra of the pro-life movement: “A child, not a choice.” Sunday’s proclaimed the mantra of the abortion rights movement to oppose vaccines: “My body, my choice.”

Friday’s crowd endorsed the most obtrusive of big-government mandates, laws telling women they can’t make their own reproductive decisions. Sunday’s argued that health decisions must be made by patient and doctor, not government.

Friday’s crowd pleaded for the lives of the most vulnerable. Sunday’s demanded the right to infect the most vulnerable by eschewing vaccines and masks in shared spaces.

It was enough to make one wonder: Does taking ivermectin cause people to lose their sense of irony?...

How do death rates from COVID-19 differ between people who are vaccinated and those who are not?

To understand how the pandemic is evolving, it’s crucial to know how death rates from COVID-19 are affected by vaccination status. The death rate is a key metric that can accurately show us how effective vaccines are against severe forms of the disease. This may change over time when there are changes in the prevalence of COVID-19, and because of factors such as waning immunity, new strains of the virus, and the use of boosters....

'What's Mild About Hospitals at the Breaking Point?': What We Heard This Week
Quotable quotes heard by MedPage Today reporters


Don't Spend $103 Million on Health Worker Burnout ...
— ... Instead, spend that money to fix the problems that caused the burnout in the first place

...Over the past 2 years of this terrible pandemic, we've seen efforts at wellness promotion range from free food to coupons for yoga and meditation classes. Unfortunately, these do very little to address the many underlying problems, and are often seen by those of us working on the front lines as paying lip service, to the point of almost being insulting.

Recommendations to exercise, eat healthy, get plenty of sleep, and seek mental healthcare when we need it are, while sound advice, often impractical. During times of war -- and war this has been -- telling people to duck their heads seems less than helpful....

Do Not Assume COVID Pandemic Reaching 'End Game', Warns WHO

..."It's dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant and that we are in the end game," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a WHO executive board meeting of the two-year pandemic that has killed nearly 6 million people.

"On the contrary, globally the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge."...

COVID Is a Disaster. It Could Have Been Worse.

...The pandemic has been a tragedy by any standard. Nearly a million deaths in the US and more than five and a half million worldwide mean that more people have died from COVID during this pandemic than in the past 30 years of influenza.

And even as I think about that, it's hard for me not to let my mind imagine the myriad ways this could have been worse. I don't mean to be insensitive to those of us who have lost loved ones during the pandemic, or who are still suffering from the effects of infection, but the fact is, we caught quite a few breaks over the past 2 years. I want to discuss those things not to try to make us feel better about this collective tragedy, but to remind us that there are lessons to be learned here. In the next pandemic — and there will be another, eventually — we may not be so lucky. Here are three of my COVID what-ifs...