Abortion Rights Aborted
You surely don’t need us telling you about the Supreme Court’s conclusion that they were wrong for 50 years and abortion isn’t really protected by the 14th amendment after all.
Many states will be banning abortions ASAP, leaving their citizens with means to seek another state with amenable laws. Travel across state lines within the US to obtain legalized services is something even this Supreme Court wouldn’t be insane enough to rule against, right? Right?? Well, states such as Missouri are already instituting modern day Fugitive Slave Laws which would criminalize this act, basically daring the Court to go even further. Such a deeply partisan Supreme Court who has shown willingness to ignore 50 years of precedent is likely to make additional rulings based on ideology over case law. So who knows where this all leads. (FYI, the Supreme Court upheld the Fugitive Slave Act in 1859)
Since the FDA approves drugs on a national basis, states will likely have problems asserting authority over whether their citizens can access abortion medications, which are currently used for about 54% of abortions and by some accounts could be used for up to 90%. Drug companies spend a whole lot of money on clinical trials under the presumption that if the US FDA approves their product, they can sell it to the entire US population. If drug accessibility fragments into some sort of balkanized state-by-state regime, we can likely say goodbye to at least a chunk of the pharmaceutical innovation we currently enjoy in America. Massachusetts tried to ban a formulation of an opioid and lost the case in 2014 as the judge concluded the order was pre-empted by federal law. But as we saw last week, precedent has never been more precarious.
It will be a legal circus out there for a long, long time.
Altruistic Nonprofits
According to the American Hospital Association, nonprofits provide $9 in community benefits for every $1 in taxes they don’t pay. Suuuure they do. If that were true wouldn't they switch to paying taxes and not offering all them freebies?
Certainly it’s not as simplistic as the writer of this newsletter might imply, but a hospital association saying hospitals are doing good has to be taken with an entire salt lick. Just earlier this year some research from an independent body concluded that unreimbursed Medicaid claims are no different whether a hospital is for-profit or nonprofit. Surely that would ring true for many of the other “community benefits” the AHA hit upon in the recent release.
It’s self-serving hospital PR; ignore anything that comes from within.
Little Trouble for Big Supplement
Ahh yes, here it is, your annual ‘vitamins don’t work unless you’re pregnant or have a specific illness requiring their use’ article. This time brought to you by the US Preventive Services Task Force, which is a volunteer expert panel of medical professionals.
Long story short, there is still not enough evidence to conclude they do anything other than make you poorer. Actually, not quite – they did determine there was enough evidence showing taking beta-carotene or vitamin E makes you more likely to die.
Progress!
Mammoth Mummy
A gold miner in the Canadian portion of the Klondike (what the hell year is it?) happened upon a baby mammoth an shared a picture with the world. It had skin, hair, everything. One step closer to mammoth resurrection, perhaps?
Covid
Back in May we talked here about people getting worked up about another imminent wave of Covid based on wastewater viral RNA. That wave didn’t materialize, at least not in comparison to the size of original Omicron outbreak. Viral RNA levels in Massachusetts have been flat since early May. People are still getting Covid of course, as they will for the rest of our lives.
On the topic, estimates are out for numbers of lives saved by Covid vaccines and it’s about 20 million people. This number was arrived at by a group out of Imperial College London, not some kid on a MacBook in Vegas. Of course, your neighborhood Anti-vaxxer will plug their ears and sing if you try to share this bit of data with them, because what’s 20 million lives saved when several people may have died from the vaccine, and also they heard on Facebook that someone knows someone who knew an old lady who died shortly after being vaccinated?
Lesson Not Learned
Considering the time and effort spent developing an all-new Covid diagnostic and implementing a massive nationwide testing network in America, you might think that if we already had a diagnostic for monkeypox ready to roll, it would be very easy to roll out testing. Alas, this is America.
It’s the same story as the beginning of the Covid pandemic – doctors are refusing to test early for monkeypox, assuming instead myriad other diseases may be causing the symptoms. Why are physicians not willing to eliminate monkeypox straight away? Easy - because it’s time-consuming for them to get a patient tested for monkeypox. How in the world is that the case right after a global pandemic? Never ends, the examples of the incompetency of the American healthcare system.
One More Scourge
Ok, we hit on Covid & monkeypox, let's throw another malady into the mix, shall we? Polio was detected in the wastewater around London. This usually happens 1-3 times a year when a person vaccinated with a live virus overseas comes back to London. But it's been a frequent occurrence this year, so alarm bells are sounding. Really...frickin polio?!?? Is the black plague gonna make a comeback next? This is too much - we're heading to the country home for the duration.
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