Health Care

Why our Democracy is Ailing: Another Grim winter for our Unmasked, Unvaccinated, Disputatious, Confrontational, Conspiratorial, and disturbed Country

( Tomdispatch.com) – Whether the pandemic that’s swept the world started from a bat or not, as 2021 ends, I think it’s safe to say that we’re all far battier than we were when it began. In my neighborhood at least, as this year draws to a close, that old Lone Ranger line, “Who was […]

Anti-Vaccination

Without Biden’s Vaccination Program, a Million and a Half Americans would have died in 2021 and 12 mn would have been Hospitalized

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – President Biden made a major pandemic policy speech on Tuesday, pleading with Americans to get vaccinated, and, indeed, to get the three-shot course that is now standard. He notes that 400,000 people died from COVID-19 in 2021, almost all of them unvaccinated. He is backed up by medical professionals. Augusta […]

Addiction

Opioid Crisis: Purdue Pharma/ Sackler Family Fails in End Run around Justice

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – In a seismic victory for justice and accountability that re-opens the deeply flawed recent September, 2020 settlement of the Purdue pharma bankruptcy case, the Sackler family will be forced to confront the pain and devastation they have allegedly caused. Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for […]

Climate Crisis

Why spending $2 trillion on child care, health care and fighting climate change won’t make inflation any worse than it already is

The Conversation

By Michael Klein | – One of the main concerns raised by critics of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan is that it will drive up inflation, which is already running at the fastest pace in four decades. The Senate is currently considering a roughly US$2 trillion bill passed by the House that would […]

Epidemics

South Africa did the Right thing on Omicron: Why are Europe and the US Punishing it?

Ramzy Baroud

( Middle East Monitor) – The decision by several governments across the globe to institute travel bans on seven African countries, starting on 27 November, due to the discovery of a new Covid-19 variant, Omicron, was perceived to be hasty in the eyes of some and fully justifiable on medical grounds, in the view of […]

Epidemics

How Greed is Prolonging the Pandemic – Unless the World is Vaccinated, Variants will Keep Emerging

Peter Certo

( Otherwords.org) – Stop me if this sounds familiar. It’s been kind of a hard year, but I felt optimistic about the holidays. My wife and I had just scheduled our COVID-19 boosters. Even better, we’d been able to get our young child vaccinated. We imagined a cautious return to simple family pleasures like indoor […]

Denialism

Fauci on Ted Cruz asking for his Ouster: “What happened on Jan. 6th, Senator?” “I’ll be saving lives and they’ll be lying.”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – CBS’s Margaret Brennan interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday for Face the Nation and got some fireworks. Brennan asked Fauci about the death threats he and his family have received and how he dealt with it. He said he just went on doing his job, pointing to the lightning fast […]

Epidemics

What we know about the Omicron Corona Variant So Far

The Conversation

By Prof. Wolfgang Preiser, Cathrine Scheepers, Jinal Bhiman, Marietjie Venter, and Tulio de Oliveira | – Since early in the COVID pandemic, the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa has been monitoring changes in SARS-CoV-2. This was a valuable tool to understand better how the virus spread. In late 2020, the network detected a […]