The initial FDA EUA in May limited remdesivir use to patients receiving supplemental oxygen.
This changed in the updated Aug 28 EUA: Remdesivir "may be effective for the treatment of suspected or laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in all hospitalized adult and pediatric patients."
I taught a class on the history of eugenics and public health today. Here's what we covered: 🧵
Eugenics is Greek for 'well-born'. But it wasn't coined by the Greeks. It's a late 19th century term made up by Francis Galton. He LOVED data. We will come back to that.
Eugenics had the biggest impact on the approach to mental illness, immigration, and reproductive justice.
We will dig into each.
But first, you gotta know the background and key players.
For background, eugenics arose in an environment obsessed with progress, but also frustrated with economic and social realities.
Having worked in conflict zones, I want to share a bit on humanitarian response in Gaza, as aid starts to trickle in.
This isn’t a thread on how to end the war, or hostages, or any of the other very important things. Those are critical too. But they’re not at all my expertise 🧵
Over the past week, shortages in food, water, and electricity have exacerbated the humanitarian and health challenges.
This creates new problems, as well as worsening chronic issues.
Without gas, generators can’t run. Newborns on life support in intensive care can’t survive.
Without electricity, patients can’t receive dialysis. Insulin for diabetes can’t be kept refrigerated, as it should be. These chronic health issues worsen, quickly.
Without water, infectious diseases like cholera (and others) become increasingly likely.
Today I spoke in a colleague’s class about the COVID-19 pandemic.
He asked me to talk about what it was like in NYC’s emergency rooms in March and April 2020. Seemed easy enough.
But revisiting the trauma was really hard and painful.
I’m still not sure we’ve fully processed.
It really hit me when I described how we strung oxygen tubing from the wall outlets up through the ceiling so it reached patients in the middle of the ER who were suffocating when the canisters under their bed ran out…
We all normalized something that just wasn’t normal, at all
It had been years since I thought about how my colleague avoided my gaze as I examined her.
Struggling to breathe, she was looking over my shoulder as her mother was intubated across the emergency room.
You know why we intubated people for Covid in March 2020?
Because otherwise they were going to die. Full. Stop.
I remember a patient rolling in with an oxygen saturation of 42%, breathing twice as fast as normal,struggling on a face mask with oxygen all the way up.
What to do?
I’m sick of seeing people trying to relitigate 2020 through the eyes of 2023.
If you miraculously know everything now, why didn’t you tell us so then?
So over a million Americans didn’t have to die of Covid.
So we didn’t have to put ourselves at risk every time we went to work
I don’t care about the narrative you want to create, from the safety of where you stand now.
Do not try to reimagine the environment and the challenges so many of my colleagues felt on the frontlines, 3 years ago, when we knew almost nothing.