Here is Dr. Klotman’s Week 260 video address. The highlights are:
Measles
- The disease was declared eliminated from the US in 2020 when everyone was getting two doses of MMR
- This year, we have already exceeded the number of measles cases of any year since 2000
- At the time of Dr. Klotman’s address, there were 223 US cases; the case count is 300 today
- Last year there were 285 cases of measles
- There are increasing sporadic cases in the US related to international travel, and they lead to outbreaks where MMR vaccination rates are below 95%
- 20% of measles cases get hospitalized – mostly for viral pneumonia
SARS-CoV-2 (COVID)
- This is the 5th anniversary of the WHO declaration of the COVID pandemic
- Seven million or more people died of COVID worldwide – 1.2 million were Americans
- There are still COVID denialists who see COVID deaths as deaths among old people who were going to die anyway. They have conveniently forgotten the refrigerator trucks serving as improvised morgues for those who died of the disease
- During the worst of the COVID pandemic, Flu virtually disappeared because of mask wearing
- Now that Influenza is back, COVID continues to cause more deaths than Flu
- The social and educational costs of the pandemic and America’s feckless response to it affected an entire generation
- NIH contributions to the resolution of the pandemic included
- Sequencing of the COVID genome
- Development of m-RNA vaccines to the virus
- Bobby (Trofim) Kennedy (Lysenko) has terminated all NIH grants related to the study of vaccine hesitancy – what the fuck could possibly go wrong?
On the Horizon
- The next pandemic will probably be a respiratory virus – another coronavirus, Influenza, H5N1 bird flu, or something else novel
- There’s been a recent outbreak of H5N1 flu in Belgian cats
Personal Notes: Tomorrow, The Ides of March, is our six-month anniversary since Susan’s and my last COVID vaccines. Susan and I are going to schedule our vaccinations tomorrow or the day after.
I remember having a futile FB back-and-forth with a COVID denialist back during the peak of the COVID apocalypse. The individual in question, a FB denizen friend of one of my FB friends, insisted that the pandemic was overblown because only 3% of the infected died, and they were mostly old and on their last legs anyway.
I suppose that this mindset has been around since Pneumococcal Pneumonia was known as the “old man’s friend,” according to Sir William Osler who is recognized as the “Father of Internal Medicine” – my discipline. What I learned from my exchanges with that individual is that there is no point in arguing with ideologues. No argument will change their blind beliefs, and undertaking such arguments is exhausting.
I say, “Fuck ‘Em!”