GOT COVID? DOGE GOT YOUR PAXLOVID!

 

You heard it here first:  Medicare no longer covers the one drug which actually stops COVID virus from replicating and is highly effective, orally, to rescue patients from the prospect of a respirator: Paxlovid.

No, some things are still available and not removed from reach:  not intravenous bleach, chloroquine or Ivermectin: Mad Dog has not inquired about coverage for those. But then again, unless you are a horse with worms or have a strong death wish, those are no great loss.

Go on Google and you will be told by Google AI Paxlovid is still covered by Medicare Part D (the drug part) but, for once, AI has failed us. 

How does Mad Dog know?

Actual non AI experience in what is now called "actual life," or AL for "actual life" or "alternative life."

Ah, it's New Hampshire, where we live free, and now may have to opt for the second half of that slogan: die.

A New Hampshire chorus of mostly 70 and 80 something women traveled to Scotland and did a number of concerts over the course of June 21-June 28, and about 3 days into the tour, one member tripped and fell, and had to be seen by Scotland's excellent National Health Service, where they found her to be febrile and alertly tested her for COVID, and she was positive. She wore a mask and sat in the back of the bus, and was otherwise isolated/ostracized, but clearly she had been infectious before she was discovered and by the time the chorus of eighty members got home, 45% of the chorus was coughing or simply tested and found to be positive.

Now, this is a pretty robust group of sixty, seventy and eighty year old women, who chose Scotland so they could hike up mountains between performances, but if you are COVID positive, coughing and symptomatic, over 65, Paxlovid is the safest thing to do, and while it has been underused it's well proven to prevent a respirator fate.

So, these women, who communicate avidly electronically, started seeing doctors and getting prescriptions for Paxlovid. Ah, the day is saved!

Or not.

Turns out when they went to the pharmacy to fill the prescriptions every one of them, some who live in Maine, were told the cost is now $700 (for a prescription we can all remember was $50 when Biden was in office.)

Many, not being women of great means, went home without the Paxlovid to face their fate.

So there you have the essence of government efficiency! DOGE has struck again, and this time into the homeland. 

And these are mostly White women, returning from a decidedly not "shit-hole" country with their American passports, so you might think Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk or RFK JR would not have them in their sites.

Of course, neither New Hampshire nor Maine voted for Trump, so there's that--but Maine has a Republican Senator. 

And RFK JR has intimated that if they just ate right and stayed young, none of this would ever have happened.

And really, what could be more efficient than not treating this group? Most of them are on Medicare, some getting Social Security, and some will ultimately need nursing homes, so if these folks die now, in the immortal formulation of Congressman Norman from South Carolina, well, that's a cost saving!

PS: A word on "coverage." 

One woman was told Medicare did "cover" Paxlovid, which costs $2,000, but her "copay" went from $50 last year to $700. So is that really "coverage"? 

There really is no "cost" for any drug now. A doctor who finds a bloated Ixodes tick on him after working in the garden and writes himself a prescription for doxycycline discovers the cost is $1,500. He calls his own doctor who calls in the Rx and the bill is $1.50. So what is the cost of doxycycline or any drug, for that matter?

COVID Revisionist History

 

Needing podcasts for my two hour bicycle rides, I am always willing to try something new.  Carole Hooven appeared on a podcast called "Dishcast," and its host, Andrew Sullivan, did a creditable job with her so I tuned in to his interview with a Princeton professor, Frances Lee, who wrote a book, "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us," from which I learned:

Andrew Sullivan

1. Children who were held out of schools--which, of course the authors argue was unnecessary and fruitless--suffered irreparable harm, and rendered into a lost generation of under performing half wits, and all because people like Tony Fauci and the CDC were doctrinaire, unwilling to listen to reason, and dictatorial and too sure of their own superior knowledge.

2. Masking was all theater and should never have been tried, and Tony Fauci was against it before he was for it, and so which was it Tony?

3. Even the vaccines were a failure and social distancing was ridiculous and look at what happened when all those gay guys in Provincetown, MA went out to bars having been full vaccinated and got COVID anyway.

4. And even Francis Collins now says it was a lab leak.

Dr. Frances Lee

Of course, neither of these two Ivy Leaguers listened to a single minute of This Week In Virology, (TWiV), the podcast out of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons during the pandemic, or if they did, apparently the content went right over their heads.

But there is a whole fad of books now about how stupid and arrogant Fauci and friends were during the pandemic, and how much harm his policies did and how Ron DeSantis was right all along.

When I hear these podcasts, or read this revisionist history, I usually find myself wondering: On what planet did these people spend the majority of their time during that pandemic?

Nowhere in these anti-establishment renditions is there mention of those 18 wheel rigs lined up outside Mt. Sinai Hospital, Roosevelt Hospital, Bellvue Hospital, The New York Hospital, Columbia, which were stacked to the roof tops with the bodies because the morgues could not hold them all. Nowhere mentioned is the estimate that with the best data, 3 million Americans were going to die, although, in the end, likely because of public health measures like quarantines, distancing, maybe even masking and certainly the vaccine, only 1 million died, so likely 2 million were spare owing to public health measures. 

Of course, with COVID, most of the data was hard to parse and it's always tough to be sure when people died at a nursing home, how many actually died from COVID.

The TWiV Team

But, had Andrew Sullivan listened to Dr. Fauci on TWiV, he would have heard him say, repeatedly, "You know, we're in a data free zone here. I'm giving you the best advice I can, right now, based on what we know today, but two weeks from now, I may well be saying the opposite, after new studies get done."

He was hardly arrogant. One thing you can say about Fauci, and this has been his hallmark since he was at Cornell, is Fauci has always been surprisingly not arrogant, and has always been aware of having grown up in an apartment over his father's pharmacy in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, went through high school, college and medical school on scholarships.  He may not be exactly humble; he's confident, but he is not arrogant. 

He did not think masks would help, initially, because to a virus the pores in a mask look like the Holland Tunnel, but when it turned out droplets were a problem, he embraced masks, and what is so onerous, really, about wearing a mask? Low cost, possibly high return.

And as anyone who actually took the time to listen to the 4 hours a week of TWiV, during those years 2020-2022, the Provincetown outbreak would have been no surprise: The vaccine was never expected to provide protection from infection or disease. Like the influenza vaccine, it was hoped it would prevent intubation in an ICU and death, which it did. Vaccinated people caught COVID, but they did not die and most did need to be hospitalized

Yes, Sweden opted to keep kids in school, and it's not clear Sweden suffered more deaths, but comparing Sweden to the US is like comparing New York City to Claremont, New Hampshire. In urban populations, in countries with dense concentrations of population, infectious diseases tend to be spread differently. And, for the most part, deaths in the Red states were more likely because the Red state folks did not follow public health advice.

The professor and Mr. Sullivan made much of the way people in power behaved, like Boris Johnson's "party gate" and Gavin Newsome's visit to the winery, as if they really knew all along isolating people was worthless and so they party-ed on. As if...

And as for the lab leak: As Fauci has said, anything is possible, but lab leak is not the likely culprit, not when a far more likely culprit exists: wet markets.  The TWiV crew has addressed this repeatedly, and they've marshalled the details of what evidence exists--the finding of the exact virus in the drains at the wet market, the timing and pattern of the spread of the virus from the market, the fact that multiple other viral epidemics have emanated from these markets in the past, the culprit vectors, pangolins, bats, all add up to a beyond a reasonable doubt it was a crossover virus making the leap, as so many other viruses (SARS among them) have done in the past. 

You did not need to invent a Jack the Ripper to explain deaths when you had the Black Plague ripping through town.

And so what if it was a lab leak? Ted Cruz would have you believe that Tony Fauci's NIH funded the Wuhan lab to make this virus, and it escaped or was deliberately loosed upon the world by some James Bond type villain in China,  so it's all Tony's fault. In fact, Tony Fauci would be only too happy to help the Wuhan lab work with this virus and other potential threats like it, so we can avoid pandemics in the future.

Professor Lee and Mr. Sullivan are not a unique species. There is a type of academic and a type of news media specimen who thrive on playing the role of the smart guys, who are not afraid to speak truth of power, if not to power, who are clever enough to see past the prevailing wisdom to the truth, which is available to hard headed thinkers, who can "do their own research" and get past the establishment to the truth.

They are, at base, conspiracists. 

But they are wrong and wrong headed.

And they are, whatever else they are, Monday morning quarter backs, who have never had a shot fired in anger at them, and never had to make hard calls under duress. 

They are, to use Spiro Agnew's immortal phrase, "effete elitists."