Tag Archives: pandemic

medical news

Thank you, Dr. Fauci

While we’re giving thanks to this or that person, I want to offer a word or two of gratitude for the public service delivered by someone who served seven U.S. presidents.

Anthony Fauci has retired from his post as chief medical adviser to President Biden. He is calling it a career after serving as the nation’s chief infectious disease expert.

I want to offer him thanks for taking on a job that earned him as many foes as friends over the years. Why is that? Because he was unable to predict the course that infectious diseases would take, but he still managed to save literally millions of lives over his many years of service.

Republicans who are about to take control of the House of Representatives have promised to bring Dr. Fauci back to Capitol Hill to answer stern questions about his service during the COVID pandemic. The good doc likely will stand strong against the GOP onslaught.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Fauci while attending the International Conference on HIV/AIDS in Bangkok back in the summer of 2004. He was there to provide wise counsel to those seeking answers to that disease. I was in Bangkok as part of a journalist contingent traveling through Southeast Asia to learn about the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in that part of the world.

Fauci served with distinction in presidential administrations dating back to Ronald Reagan. He served under the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and finally, Joe Biden.

Yes, there were some rocky times, particularly during the Trump years as the administration sought to get its arms around the COVID virus. The vitriol hurled against Dr. Fauci from those on the far right has been unfair and just plain wrong.

I just want to take this brief moment to express one American patriot’s deep thanks for the service Anthony Fauci delivered. Those who survived illness from the killer virus well might owe this good man their lives.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden, media news, medical news, political news

Pandemic is not ‘over’

OK, Mr. President, I feel the need to set the record straight on something you reportedly blurted out on national TV the other evening.

You told “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley that the coronavirus pandemic “is over.” Uh, Mr. President? It’s not over! It’s still with us. Pharmaceutical companies are producing new vaccines and boosters. They’re making them available for schmucks like me to take … and I damn sure am going to receive my second booster shot in very short order.

What troubles me about your careless assertion that the pandemic is “over” is that it well might cause too many Americans to let down their guard.

I also heard what you told Pelley about how so many more millions of Americans are getting vaccinated than there were when you took office. I also heard how you said that the death toll has dropped off dramatically. That’s all true.

However, if the pandemic is “over,” why make such a big deal of having this vaccine booster available?

To be clear, I am not going to join the right-wing cabal of critics in suggesting that you’re “out of touch” or that you don’t have the intellectual heft to stay on the job as president. I am with you, Mr. President.

It’s just that your words carry tremendous weight. I mean, jeez, don’t say things that reverberate the way public pronouncements do. That reverberation is amplified when it involves statements that have killed nearly 1 million Americans and caused enormous anxiety among millions of other Americans.

Look, Mr. President, a member of my immediate family became sickened right after Christmas 2020. We could have lost her! We didn’t. However, she isn’t right just yet.

Others, too, are suffering recurrences of the disease.

Businesses are still “strongly encouraging” masks. Hospitals are offering free instant exams to patients checking in with unrelated emergencies.

Does that sound like a pandemic that has run its course?

It’s still with us, Mr. President.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

education news, State news

Teachers want to bail

Finding and keeping high-quality educators is a difficult enough job even when conditions are ideal. Throw in a killer pandemic and then politics on top of that, then the public school system faces a seriously daunting task.

The Texas Tribune reports a disturbing trend: Results from a new online survey of K-12 teachers in Texas, released on Thursday, shows most “seriously considered” leaving the profession this year, a 19% increase from two years ago.

Not good, man. Not good at all.

Earlier this year we saw Dallas-Fort Worth area school districts pummeled by resignations of superintendents, some of whom were leaving districts that as recently a year ago were honored for superlative work in educating children.

What drove them away? In too many cases, it was the constant hectoring from parents over mask mandates and other restrictions made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Tribune reports:

For its third annual survey on teacher satisfaction, the Charles Butt Foundation last spring sent an online questionnaire to 1,291 Texas public school teachers who were randomly selected from the Texas Education Agency’s 2020 roster of teachers in the state. All of them responded.

The Charles Butt Foundation is a nonprofit organization named after the chair and CEO of H-E-B, the largest privately held employer in Texas. The foundation’s goal is to make public education more equitable across the state through community partnerships.

I tried my hand at substitute teaching in 2012 and learned right away I am not wired to work with other people’s children. My brief exposure to classroom work filled me with admiration for those who see it as a calling.

Therefore, I am unsettled to learn that politics is getting in the way of those who are dedicated to guiding young minds and to teaching them skills they will need to succeed.

New survey indicates more Texas teachers want to quit | The Texas Tribune

It shouldn’t need to be said, but Texas can ill-afford to let good teachers go because of political pressure. Our public school system, for which we all pay, suffers as a result.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, State news

Public service or sacrifice?

It is virtually impossible to find any situation equal to what public servants are experiencing in this era of petulance, but I might have a close example.

Gillespie County, Texas, no longer has an elections department because its officials have resigned over the harassment they have received in light of the 2020 presidential election. Teachers have quit their jobs because parents have grown intolerably angry over mask mandates and other requirements imposed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

The closest example to this I have experienced in my lifetime occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Americans turned their anger over the Vietnam War to those of us who participated in it. Our military personnel were following lawful orders but when they returned home from that war, they were treated in many cases like war criminals.

We grew out of that anger … eventually.

My hope now is that we can outgrow what is occurring now.

As the Dallas Morning News noted in an editorial:

This needs to stop. We believe in an America where people are willing to listen to each other, where they are willing to see the humanity in another person, where we are willing to admit maybe there is another side to the story.

That’s called maturity. It’s something that’s in too short supply these days. Some growing up would do us good.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Go after Fauci? Why?

Did I read this right, that if Republicans take control of Congress after the midterm election that they’re going to “go after” Dr. Anthony Fauci?

This prompts two immediate questions: What has he done to provoke this vengeful reaction? Why go after a man who has decided to retire from public service after serving presidents of both parties with distinction for many decades?

The threat comes from Sen. John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican who bears not a single similarity to the late president whose name he shares.

Fauci announced this week he is stepping down in December as President Biden’s chief medical adviser. The man has had a full plate over many years. It became a heaping plate when the coronavirus pandemic broke in late 2019.

His advice rankled many on the right, including the man who brought him on board to help deal with the pandemic … Donald J. Trump.

So now there might be another persecution in store, if the cards align and the GOP takes back Congress.

So says John Kennedy.

Good grief! The man saved many thousands of lives with his advice to two presidents of the United States, Donald Trump and then Joe Biden.

It looks for all the world to me as though Kennedy wants to make as much hay as Americans can stand.

Well, he can count me out.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Many thanks, Dr. Fauci

Just got word of what many of us expected all along: Anthony Fauci is going to retire from a several-decades-long career in public service.

To which I want to offer the good doctor a heartfelt expression of thanks and gratitude for all he has done to help protect us against infectious disease.

Fauci, of course, became the face of medical awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic that spanned two administrations, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. He is the nation’s — if not the world’s — leading expert on infectious disease. He spoke the truth to us when he had the answers to a disease that was killing thousands of Americans daily. When he didn’t know the answers, he had the guts to say so.

Oh, but the man who served as President Biden’s senior medical adviser, had to endure the defamatory criticism that came from the far-right wing of our political life. They didn’t trust him. They bristled at mask mandates, at calls for social distancing, at government telling citizens what they needed to protect themselves and others from a killer virus. He even had to endure the undermining of his public statements that came from Donald J. Trump, who hired him to manage our pandemic response.

Fauci served through several administrations, going back to the time of Ronald Reagan. He served with honor and with dedication to the practice of medicine and public health.

Fauci said he will leave in December. Presumably he will head toward a private life with his wife and family.

The man has earned some time off.

As the saying goes to those who have devoted their life to the cause of serving the public … thank you for your service, doc.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

economic news, Joe Biden, national news

Are we better off … ?

The Republican leader of the U.S. House of Representatives sought to make some political hay by asking if we are “better off today than we were two years ago.”

Well, Kevin McCarthy of California, your effort to denigrate Joe Biden’s presidency deserves a look. So … here goes:

  • On Biden’s watch, Congress approved a bipartisan bill — the first in 30-something years — that seeks to stem gun violence.
  • When Russia invaded Ukraine this past February, President Biden was able to present a unified NATO and European Union front in response to the illegal and criminal act of war.
  • The president was able to shepherd through Congress a massive infrastructure improvement bill that seeks to repair our nation’s roads, bridges and airports.
  • Joe Biden nominated and then welcomed the nation’s first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
  • We have turned the corner on the international pandemic.
  • Fuel prices, which skyrocketed and led the inflationary surge of recent months, have retreated dramatically.
  • The United States has created more private-sector jobs in the first two years of President Biden’s term than at any similar time in its history.
  • Unemployment currently stands at 3.5%.
  • Congressional Democrats — fighting unanimous Republican opposition — managed to pass the nation’s first-ever meaningful law dealing with climate change; it also seeks to curb health costs and reduce inflation.
  • We have cut by roughly half the nation’s annual budget deficit.

So, taken together, I think I have an answer to Leader McCarthy’s question.

Yes. We are better off than we were when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took office.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Where’s the compassion … doc?

It never ceases to amaze how the man who claims to represent the Texas Panhandle in Congress — the Dipsh** Doc, if you will — can exhibit so little common decency when it involves the commander in chief.

Ronny Jackson, the Republican who once, served as White House physician for Donald Trump and Barack Obama — keeps tweeting the idiotic messages calling attention to President Biden’s struggle to get past the COVID-19 infection that continues to register on his test results.

And yet … there is no expression of concern or of any good wishes for the president’s complete recovery from the ailment. It ain’t coming from Jackson, who continues to enrage many of us out here with assertions about the president’s mental acuity … which is absolute rubbish.

I must remind Jackson and other GOP critics that Joe Biden sent Donald and Melania Trump wishes for a speedy recovery when they contracted the virus.

Any reciprocity from the other side? Hah!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Thank you, Dr. Fauci

I hereby want to be among the first Americans to offer a word of thanks to Dr. Anthony Fauci for his dedicated service to the nation as its leading infectious disease expert.

Fauci said he is going to retire by the end of President Biden’s current term. Frankly, he’s earned some peace and quiet and some time with his family.

The good doctor, who’s 80 years of age, has become a punching bag among those on the right who have objected to his constant lecturing to us about masks, about social distancing, about the need to vaccinate ourselves against the COVID 19 virus. He has been on the front pages of newspapers and on our TV screens endlessly since the pandemic broke in late 2019.

Now, to be clear, Fauci hasn’t always gotten everything spot-on correct every single time. Do I blame him for that? Do I expect this learned medical scholar to get every single detail correct upon its first utterance? No. The man is a human being.

He has sought to educate himself along the way about the pandemic and for my money he has given us solid advice along the way. He is not, as Donald Trump once described him, a loser or an idiot … or some such epithet.

Joe Biden has shown the good sense to let the scientific team led by Fauci do the speaking for the administration on the pandemic.

You can take this to the bank, too: Right wingers are going to say something like “Just wait until we get Congress back under our control and we’ll launch investigations into how Fauci ‘lied’ to us.” Bullsh**!

The man has served through seven presidential administrations and has devoted his career to public service. Anthony Fauci has served the public in the finest tradition imaginable.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

We are sinking ever lower

Have we really devolved into a society that applauds a candidate who says a medical official hired to guide the nation out of a killer pandemic should be stood in front of a firing squad and executed?

Never mind. I know the answer. It is yes. It sickens me to my core.

John Benett is chair of the Oklahoma Republican Party. He told a cheering crowd that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be shot by a firing squad. The worst part? The crowd cheered and clapped at the congressional candidate’s hideous message!

The Huffington Post reported:

“We’re fighting communist Democrats, establishment RINOs!” Bennett ranted in a video that Right Wing Watch shared online Tuesday and has now gone viral.

“We’re fighting against a system that stole the election in 2020 and nobody had been held accountable,” he continued, parroting former President Donald Trump’s baseless election fraud claims. “We’re in a war with bureaucrats that have forced vaccine mandates on us, mask mandates on us.”

Oh my goodness.

“In a war”? Is this clown serious? Yeah. He is.

Republicans Cheer As Congressional Candidate Demands Fauci’s Execution By Firing Squad (msn.com)

There is not a single thing I can say that is going to sink into the thick skulls of those who buy into that bullsh**.  I am left only to condemn in the strongest terms possible the kind of hateful demagoguery that has become the norm within what used to be known as a great political party.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com