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When Politics and Healthcare Meet No One Wins
When politics and healthcare meet, no one wins. Certainly not me, anyway.
As a practicing nurse in California, I am mandated by law to comply with a two-dose mRNA vaccine with booster. Regardless of masking and a downward trend, the California Department of Public Health has instituted guidelines that pressure all medical staff (and medically adjacent) to get a booster if they’ve already been vaccinated. Religious exemptions will only be tolerated if they were previously known, documented, and thoroughly supported. No “new” exemptions will be allowed.
This means that a convert to fundamental Christianity who discovers that the mRNA vaccines were created with descendent lines of cells taken from aborted fetal tissue will not be allowed an exemption for their newfound religiosity.
For those of us who love freedom, this alone is concerning.
But for me, personally, what is more concerning is the following CDPH guidance about medical exemptions:
To determine qualifying medical reasons, the physician, nurse practitioner, or other licensed medical professional practicing under the license of a physician should refer to Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of COVID-19 Vaccines from the CDC, specifically, clinical considerations, as well as contraindications and precautions. The identified contraindications include:
- Documented history of severe allergic reaction to one or more components of all the COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S.
- Documented history of severe or immediate-type hypersensitivity allergic reaction to a COVID-19 vaccine, along with a reason why you cannot be vaccinated with one of the other available formulations.
It is not enough that my doctor indicates that I had a severe reaction to my Covid vaccine; I have to convince my doctor to justify why I cannot take another vaccine that is available. Additionally, guidance states that only severe anaphylaxis is a reason to exempt employees. When referred to the CDC website, it makes it very clear what it considers to be a severe enough reaction:
For the purposes of this guidance, regarding severity of allergic reactions:
Severe allergic reactions include:
- Possible anaphylaxis, a progressive life-threatening reaction that typically includes urticaria but also with other symptoms such as wheezing, difficulty breathing, or low blood pressure (see Appendix D)
- Any angioedema affecting the airway (i.e., tongue, uvula, or larynx)
- Diffuse rash which also involves mucosal surfaces (e.g., Stevens-Johnson Syndrome)
Non-severe allergic reactions may include:
- Urticaria (hives) beyond the injection site
- Angioedema (visible swelling) involving lips, facial skin, or skin in other locations. NOTE: Any angioedema affecting the airway (i.e., tongue, uvula, or larynx) is considered a severe allergic reaction (see above).
Additionally, people who have had myocarditis following their Covid vaccination with a mRNA vaccine are still somehow recommended to get a booster once they have recovered.
Ultimately, the CDC decides to cover itself by indicating that if these guidelines aren’t specific enough (vaccinate everyone, all the time!), you can have one of their special scientists look at your patient’s case to determine if they should or should not get a vaccine or booster. I’m sure, given the above guidance, that they will be completely circumspect and immune to any sort of government pressure to impose vaccinations for all but the most immediate life-threatening of reactions.
At the end of the day, for me, it has emerged like most bureaucratic decrees; though everyone agrees that I should not get another vaccine because of the severity of the reaction, no one wants to be the one to sign the letter. Filing this letter with my institution leaves it open to CDPH, which leaves it open to the CDC. Both of these entities could have a negative impact on my physicians (yes, plural) who do not want to be the one to formally make the call; one could lose a practice, one could lose a research grant, one could lose a prestigious place on a medical board. If it came out that they helped someone avoid guidelines, it could be perceived as anti-vax behaviors and a lack of confidence in science. It could be perceived as defiance of common-sense medical guidelines put in place by the CDC. It could also impact their licensing from the state board (rumor has it).
It could be very, very negative for them.
Additionally, and perhaps more pedestrian, no one wants to sit down and take the time to write a letter that justifies to CDPH exactly how it is that I should be exempt from both types of vaccines (because guidance is that if you’re allergic to one type, you get the other). Time is, after all, money. Particularly in healthcare, the time taken to write a letter of this magnitude requires research, finesse, and an iron-clad line of argument. This is time that would or could be better spent in rooms with patients, teaching medical students, writing research papers, or cutting down the mountain of digital charting that depresses every practitioner in every state.
At the end of the day, these policies are not good for anyone individually and probably not even good for society as a whole, as Covid peters out into a milder, friendlier version of SARS.
But most importantly to me, this policy endangers not only my livelihood, but realistically, also my life as getting another vaccine could potentially be deadly. It is one thing to insist that we are vaccinated for patient care. It is another to disregard thrombocytopenia, coagulopathies, allergies, and even myocarditis in a push for political correctness.
At the end of the day, my job is not worth my death, even if it means leaving patient care.
Published in General
I know a guy who has never been vaccinated and never been sick. He recently tested himself for antibodies and found that he has a high titer and he is essentially immune. Go figure. I guess he got sick in secret.
That has happened to several people I know. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it applies to JY as well. From what I understand, there’s two ways to test antibodies. One is easy, and highly inaccurate. The second is more difficult, a lot more accurate, and rarely done (something to do with T cells?)
So we all know things are not anywhere close to as bad as the various government entities have said and acted. But we do know, and I know you know, how unreliable institutional medical care has gotten. I’m certain the signs of this have been out there, I’ve seen them myself, but the pandemic did a complete unveiling. I’m completely fed up with the hospitals and institutional medical practitioners.
My last comment reordered my thinking on this point. The pandemic’s unveiling of the medical practice community, hospitals and institutional practitioners as fully committed to government authority and corporate health product investors has been almost as revealing of truth to the people as President Trump’s revealing of the politicians and bureaucrats during his term.
Agreed. I sat my entire family down at the beginning of this debacle, handed everyone a bottle of Vit D and lectured everyone on eating right, getting outside, etc. At the time, my thinking was that hospitals would be overrun with Covid patients and we didn’t want to add to the crunch and expose ourselves.
Turns out it was great advice (that everyone took) but for a different reason. Take care of yourself and stay healthy, because available care is not to be trusted.
the 16,000+ dead the last 7 days from COVID in the USA disagree…….they do not believe the corporate conspiracy theories anymore..
Thanks for displaying exactly the arrogance and insensitivity we’ve come to expect from the Medical-Industrial complex.
I finally got around to reading it.
The method of establishing prior Covid infection was a positive PCR test followed by three weeks of being symptom-free. If you suspect a problem there, you are correct.
The lack of an antibody response was highly correlated with high Ct values on the PCR test (as well as with younger age). Those with high Ct values are people who probably can’t be said to have had covid within three weeks of the test. But antibodies should last a lot longer than three weeks, so that doesn’t invalidate the methodology, but it makes one wonder just what they did have and when. Those are data we don’t have.
It would have been interesting (and to my mind, more definitive) if they had also checked for T-cells and memory B-cells, which are a much longer-lasting immune response than antibodies, but those tests can’t be made from blood samples, so it would have to have been a more difficult study to do.
Some mention was made of other studies showing that the immune response is highly variable after an infection. That’s also what Shane Crotty was saying about the time the vaccines came out and when we were wondering just how long their effectiveness would last. I didn’t see Crotty listed as an author on any of the cited papers, but maybe he was basing his remarks on some of them. I don’t happen to know. I checked the date on one of those papers, and it was before the vaccines started rolling out.
Later: Slight edits for clarity.
If the paper was cited in response to this statement, then I’d say it was a good enough study.
If the good Dr. Kheriarty really said it in such absolute terms, then he is clearly wrong, especially for this kind of virus. But this study cited by Dr. MiMac is about people who didn’t develop antibodies. However, even if that’s Kheriarty’s definition of natural immunity he’s still wrong. But this is turning into a garbled mess. What did he actually say?
My, aren’t we quite the snowflakes now.
Don’t use the insult “snowflake” if you can’t apply it properly.
So now there is a politically correct way to apply the term snowflake?
So you claim you’re here because we’re all wrong, but there’s no reason for someone to show up to that place where everyone is all wrong?
Drew believes only he should hurl insults…
Yeah, never mind.
No, you were right. As far as you took it anyway. I would have gone much further.
I think for many of the people who recently used HCQ, the doctors such as Zelenko, Dr Simone Gold, the Bakersfield clinic doctors and others, they were working long hours against the predicted impending doom of a newly emerging “novel corona virus.”
They had something they saw with their own eyes was working and they wanted all of their patients to survive. So all of their patients were offered the remedy HCQ.
In the situation that they were in, I cannot imagine them undertaking to randomly give only a sugar placebo to half of their patients and the actual remedy of HCQ with Z pak or zinc to the other half.
But do you know who did accomplish a RCT of HCQ?
Mandeep R Mehra, Sapan S Desai, Frank Ruschitzka, Amit N Patel
Furthermore this study was published in The Lancet, including the online edition: May 22, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31180-6 1
Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational
registry analysis
Of course, this one study was publicized across the media, as its conclusion was that when hospitalized COV patients received HCQ with or without a macroloid, the patients were put at grave risk of either outright death or of experiencing a serious arrythmia of the heart. (While the control group survived.)
Only problem was that when this study and its findings were carefully examined, it was found out that the way such tragedies awaited those who’d been treated with HCQ had to do with those patients having been prescribed an overdose of the medication.
Unfortunately the retraction of this study’s findings was of course no where near as prominent in the news as the original huckster style 24/7 news announcement that HCQ would kill anyone receiving it.
My 4 day bout with COVID late Mar 2020 was so unremarkable that if I had still been college age and drinking all weekend, I’d have tossed the whole affair up to some weird 4 day hang over.
Never ran a fever. I felt sluggish and couldn’t smell or taste a thing. That was it.
Plus I didn’t realize til May 2020 I’d had it, as in March I was convinced the main symptom of COV was that if you were infected, you died.
I dunno. I’ve had hangovers where not being able to smell or taste anything would have been a blessed relief.
One of my fav tweets from late 2020 when a teenager recovered from Covid:
“So, I hear you got Covid and lost your taste and smell.”
“Truth. But the way my dad cooks and my brother farts, I’m grateful.”
That’s hilarious!