Here's a little thread on crappy public responses to pandemics of the past. Whenever you feel angry about the behaviour of your fellow man, remember, all this has happened before, and all this will happen again - history offers comfort. None of this is new. Enjoy.
1918 Influenza pandemic.
1885 Smallpox Pandemic (vaccinia vaccine)
1801 "La Dindonnade" - a word meaning 'turkey' and 'hoax' - the smallpox vaccine originally was taken from cowpox pustules on cows. No one believed it worked, some believed they would turn into cows.
1885 Excerpt from an antivaxxer pamphlet re Smallpox (one of the most successful vaccination strategies in the world, given we don't get smallpox now)
1802 Antivaxxer caricature of vaccinated men and women growing cow parts. (Gillray).
1885, antivaccination poster, Montreal, saying all the same things they say now (like sticking the boot into medics for imaginary kickbacks).
There are hundreds more like this. I haven't done the Chinese ephemera because I don't have the language to search for it, but if any of my Chinese colleagues could, I'd be delighted. The Chinese were hundreds of years ahead of us on variolation/vaccination.
But take heart everyone. All the arguments you see being made today have been made before. And we've prevailed through pandemics and epidemics before, and we will again. Keep speaking your truth. 🙏
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My turn for a social media break friends. I thought I had last year packed up in a box but the covid ad is circulating, and keeps knocking that box off the shelf without my permission. But first, a rant. Content warning: avoid if you’re HCW or have lost someone to covid.
The ad you saw does not represent young people (in a functioning health system, which we have). They would never be left like that. For older people, it is a different story.
Ventilation, ICU, things drugs ending in ••mab, these all help us wait out diseases in well bodies. In unwell, ageing bodies, these things make the underlying problems worse, they accelerate the complications of ageing. Older bodies can’t tolerate the drugs used for ventilation
Someone posted the other day asking the question - what is the word for the pandemic induced sheer exhaustion that everyone is feeling right now? I thought a lot about it, and can't find the original post to answer, but I think the answer is...
Grief.
Grief is sneaky. It's exhaustion, it's mood swings, it's wondering what life is all for, it's random tears and even more random laughs. It's a bit like diarrhoea in the way it comes and goes. One minute you're okay, the next you're really not.
And we all have so. much. to. grieve. Our jobs, our working relationships, the dreams we had for the future, if we have a future, our kids lives. Grief makes you wonder if everything is ever going to be okay again. You feel like you're in a dinghy in a tusnami.
Data duplication in medicine, a rant. So much time is taken up in our job of re-entering the same data, for each patient across different medical services. Medications. Medical histories. Mostly static information (in geriatrics anyway).
Then, there’s the time wasted finding information (such as blood test results). No centralised access to any of this information. So for every patient, I will re-enter their medical history and what medications they’re on.
The level of error that gets introduced by duplication is concerning. Especially for residential aged care residents whose histories are long. I have residents on up to 45 drugs at a time. Databases all have slightly different formats and nomenclature for this stuff.
I know everyone is focusing on the new changes to medicare but I want to point out something more insidious. The freeze on the medicare rebates for GPs. This is the single biggest erosion of Medicare there is.
What does this mean? The amount Medicare rebates for your visit to the GP is about $37. Usually this price is indexed (rises a small amount in line with wage levels) every year. Until it was 'temporarily' frozen in 2013.
Other specialties item numbers have continued to be indexed (please remember that GP is now a specialty too with it's own training program, I'm aware it didn't use to be) but not GPs. So they are running practices on 2021 costs but being 2013/14 wages.
Everything we see with Medicare, with private contractors managing hotel quarantine and vaccine rollouts, goes back to medical deregulation. It used to be that only doctors/allied health could run these organisations...
...but this was changed (deregulated) to anyone who wanted to own a medical practice could, no expertise required. That's how franchised GP clinics came about, how privatised medical organisations appeared etc.
This was done under the veil of 'good economic management' but what we know now is that the real result was taxpayer money going into the hands of those responsible for that deregulation.
Alright, a tweet series on what I currently think about the AZ vaccine. This is NOT medical advice, I am not an expert by any means, I don't have the same access to data that the public health guys do, I'm just a geriatrician trying to figure this out too in an info vacuum.
So before you get stuck into me about being a murderer/playing god/being Bill Gates drone...just don't. I'm not here to shame anyone, I'm here to discuss. Whatever you choose, based on your own personal circumstances, is just fine.
In 800 AD smallpox had wiped out millions. Chinese doctors discovered that by taking scrapings of smallpox and pipetting it up peoples noses, they could prevent smallpox. The fatality rate of this was a whopping 1%. People still took it; the smallpox death rate was 35%.