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Adam W Gaffney Profile picture
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16 Jul, 5 tweets, 1 min read
We simply don’t have enough of the population vaccinated. Waves of hospitalizations and deaths, even if smaller than before, are inevitable until we do.
It’s only one small part of this, but the active role some prominent, noxious media figures with big right-wing platforms have played in gleefully disseminating delusional anti-vaccination passion will kill so many people.
Tucker Carlson was already a vicious, pathetic, sniveling little bigot before all this, and now he’s somehow made himself into something worse.

google.com/amp/s/www.wash…
(Worse by process of accumulation of badness).
Imagine being extremely rich and comfortable and deciding: “My primary focus henceforth will be redistributing wealth further upward and inflating the death count from infectious disease.”

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More from @awgaffney

Adam W Gaffney Profile picture
9 Jul
The important COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness metric is: how well does it prevent *severe disease*?

With a respiratory virus, severe disease is what matters.

Severe disease = pneumonia & acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which is why and how COVID-19 kills.
Vaccine effectiveness in preventing mild disease matters *mostly* insofar as it prevents us from spreading the virus & thereby causing severe disease in others.

Because, mild respiratory tract infections themselves = colds & flu-like syndromes. Misery for a bit, but we survive.
So fact that we're talking about 3rd booster shots, when so far Pfizer vaccine w/ 2 shots has retained same effectiveness against severe disease from delta as in the original trials, doesn't make sense, particularly when 1% in low-income nations haven't been vaccinated at all.
Read 10 tweets
Adam W Gaffney Profile picture
22 Jun
Notable that one of the leading physician advocates for using ivermectin for COVID-19, Paul Marik, was once also convinced that he had cured sepsis with a combination of vitamins and steroids — a finding not replicated once a randomized trial was actually performed.

/Thread
His words: "We haven't seen a patient die of sepsis since we began using the combination therapy a year ago. We have completely changed the natural history of sepsis."

nbc12.com/story/34986689…
He's a member of the FLCCC Alliance, along with Pierre Kory, who testified in the Senate for Ron Johnson that Ivermectin is "effectively a 'miracle drug' against COVID-19."

Ivermectin is not the only FLCCC Alliance's recommendation that is not evidenced-based.
Read 16 tweets
Adam W Gaffney Profile picture
11 Jun
This article argues that the FDA's approval of Biogen's new expensive Alzheimer's drug could "mark a seismic change in how Medicare thinks about covering new drugs of marginal effectiveness."

But that's not what I want to see come out of this.

Thread.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
If the FDA approves a drug, and insurers (like Medicare) deny it for whatever reason, the public will feel that a useful therapeutic is being denied to them. Rich people, of course, will still be able to purchase the drug.
Now you may say: OK, but you said this new Alzheimer's drug may be useless, so what's the problem? Well, there are many.

First, desperate families/patients who do whatever they can to purchase it out-of-pocket may be harmed by the ineffective drug.

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/0…
Read 10 tweets
Adam W Gaffney Profile picture
4 Apr
One of the most under-emphasized findings of the Oregon Medicaid Experiment was that it found a causal link between lack of health insurance and depression that cannot be explained by lack of access to mental healthcare alone ...

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
... Gaining health insurance reduced the rate of depression by about 30% (or 9 percentage points).

The increase in mental health treatment experienced by those newly covered can't fully explain this increase. So what can?
...Well, it should be unsurprising that the uncertainty and profound strain produced by precarity & deprivation would worsen mental health! Alleviating some of that uncertainty might, conversely, help improve mental health.
Read 7 tweets
Adam W Gaffney Profile picture
4 Apr
Some thoughts on this new blog post in @Health_Affairs by Caroline Kelly, @WF_Parker, and @haroldpollack, which raises some very important issues, but which I have some points of disagreement with.

healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hbl…
They rightly highlight disparities in resources between hospitals taking care of poor and rich patients — or predominantly white vs. Black patient populations — during the COVID-19 pandemic. They emphasize how such disparities could exacerbate class/racial disparities in outcomes
It's an important issue.  I wrote about such "supply inequity" in COVID-19 last year: resource maldistribution is one more manifestation of Hart's "Inverse Care Law", or idea that availability of healthcare is inversely correlated with the need for it.

thebaffler.com/salvos/bill-of…
Read 14 tweets
Adam W Gaffney Profile picture
19 Mar
Some have posited that seroprevalence studies underestimate population immunity because antibody levels wane over time, and hence implied that this or that area may "already be at herd immunity."

New Wuhan study in the @TheLancet refutes that:
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
This population level seroprevalence study found that only ~7% of the population of Wuhan was seropositive in April, 2020. With repeat measurement up to 9 months later, 90%+ of these individuals were still seropositive.
US seroprevalence estimates from commercial labs summarized by the CDC below (albeit with more methodological issues) suggest that seroprevalence remains relatively low in most US states: in every state, it appears that a majority are still susceptible.

covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tra…
Read 5 tweets

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