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‘I Do Not Choose To Run for President in 1928’
As discussed by Bill Bryson in “One Summer: America, 1927,” the above verbiage on a piece of paper handed to his secretary was how then-President Calvin Coolidge announced to the world that he would not run for reelection. Unfortunately, I have only listened to the book a couple of times and never read it proper, so I do not have my usual notes on Bryson’s take on the strange wording of the announcement. I’m sure it was funny and insightful, though. Strange, yes … and deliberate also. Interesting.
That brings me to a discussion from earlier today about “a friend” who, on his semiannual visit to his cardiologist, had a discussion about getting the booster for his COVID vaccination. The doctor’s answer was:
“We are not telling people not to get it.”
Now, that might be a slight paraphrase. I do have it on good authority that my friend was not taking notes. It may have been “We are not recommending that people not get it” or something like that. But I suspect the essence of the passage is true in the telling. As it has been related to me, there was some friendly back and forth with other details, but the conversation wrapped up with that. Seems to me a rather strange … yet deliberate and practiced … way of putting it.
Quite interesting.
Published in General
The jab is helpful for 5 or 6 months. If you like that help, get a booster. If you are retired, get it. If you are <40 don’t get it. If you are in between, do what gives you piece of mind.
Even if the first jab doesn’t have bad consequences, the second could… or the first booster… or the second… At some point it seems to resemble playing Russian Roulette while adding a bullet each time.
Thinking about it, that was not at all an inappropriate answer. But perhaps it wasn’t enthusiastic enough.
The one thing I hate about Bill Bryson is how he let me slip into my fourth decade on earth before my discovering him.
And alas, although Bryson discovered Coolidge, Coolidge never got to discover him.
If one works for a hospital with administrators owned by Big Pharma, one must be careful how one recommends things, or how one recommends against.
Because most physicians don’t want to inject politics in their practice, and this topic is so political now as to be idiotic. Get vaccinated or don’t. Patients have a right to make bad choices.
I give advice. Take it or leave it.
Perfect. That is the American way! …?
I thought we were part of the global community, nationalism is bad, etc. Should Americans, other Westerners be getting a booster when so many others around the world have not even gotten one shot!!!! I weep. That’s my reason for not getting the booster even though I am semi-retired DonG.
Yes. But the more the exact passage runs through my head, the more I wonder: Does it mean that it is their general policy not to tell people not to get it (aside from individual cases with specific medical issues, I presume) or that they “are not (under any circumstances)” telling people not to get it. Is it a precisely worded line delivered as planned or is it a throw away quip honed by one individual as an ender to the conversation as he exits the exam room? Given the typical demographics of a cardiologist’s patient list in TX, to Kozak’s point above, what interactions over the last 20 months have led to this point?
So many questions…I clearly need a diversion from my day job of watching a federal contractor (admittedly) collude with the White House in attempts to keep enforcing the unconstitutional.
I am over 65. I don’t wear a mask. I haven’t been jabbed. I am told by Brandon and others that I must be dead. Maybe I am?
I bet Net Neutrality did it back whenever that happened. It’s what killed me.
Actually the peaceniks etc were right back in the 80s, Reagan nuked the world and it’s been just a simulacrum since then.
I would have suspected global cooling.
You’re just another Reagan-Nuke Denier!
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(Somewhere along the line it seems we – or I – stopped getting notifications about promotions. For what it’s worth, that is/was an important feature to at least one of us.)
Ditto.
Very sound advice. In my long personal medical history, I have always considered my physician a learned advisor; but the choice remains mine.
It seems pretty simple to me. This is a calculatedly ambiguous answer clearly intended to imply a preceding unsaid phrase: I want to tell you not to take the vaccine, but… “We are not telling people not to get it.”
Did the doctor look down at you sternly over his reading glasses as he said this?
You mean like this?
I have also heard that our Congress critters have not gotten the jabs. So how can I sequester the 52 jabs the health Agencies want me to have, if our elected officials, who each and every American depends on, haven’t found an adequate supply yet?
As was carefully made clear in the post, this was reported by “a friend.” I will have to ask him…or was it a her. Now I can’t remember. …
Oh. Yes, right. Of course. But I just wanted to know if he was giving you the “listen very carefully” look?
Listen very carefully, Norman: I am Lying.
I have now spend a day thinking on the layers of truth in this part of your answer. To my detriment, I am old enough to remember a time when, if it were possible anywhere, sitting in the exam room with a medical specialist discussing the specifics of one’s health issues was a place that was beyond politics…and business. Maybe it was never so but, clearly, it is not true today.
Looking back, the writing was on the wall back in 2009 – 2010 when (if I recall correctly) the AMA signaled to all that is was either a pure leftist political organization or is was willing to jump aboard the unstoppable socialized medicine express for either political and/or business purposes…patients be damned. Just weeks after that catastrophe was signed into law I happened to be in the cardiologists office for my annual check-up so I asked him (not the same cardiologist seen by “a friend” above) how this was going to impact my care. He scoffed and assured me that the medical professionals on my team were in complete control of proper care based on the best science could offer. That would not change! Within a year, my general practitioner went into a concierge practice to escape the idiocy from above and within three years my cardiologist “retired.” Coincidence?
(None of this is to say that the level of care has deteriorated. I have had excellent hands-on “service” in recent years. But that expertise and hands on experience dates back to well before PPACA and the clear degradation in the “industry” we are now witnessing. But that is a discussion for another time…)
All that to say, with all due respect Mr. Kozak (which is significant, I assure you), I agree with your statement above but I suspect the idiocy (or worse) has a broad base in our current situation. I suspect the actual practitioners of medicine are stuck in the middle…”clowns to the left , jokers to the right,” if you will.
Regarding politicizing of medicine, I remember in the latter 90s getting a physical at a medical institution that I believe was rated at the time the World’s No 1 Hospital and the doctor was interviewing
his laptop computerme and asked if I owned a gun. I asked why he asked, and he looked up, and organized his thoughts and said something like, “Well, you can drop a gun and it can go off it can go though a wall and hurt a neighbor, or you could accidentally shoot someone in your house, or you could be drinking and shoot yourself. These are all require medical attention.” Uh-huh.I’m a Doc, and in my practice I tell people the pluses and minuses. Today, I see no pluses; everyone who requires a vax for medical reasons has had it or decided not to.