I am now on day eighteen of the cold virus from hell. While the snot factory has reduced production somewhat over the last few days, it hasn’t quite gotten to the point of going out of business sale and I am still blowing my nose and hawking up pieces of lung far more frequently than is comfortable. I don’t feel that bad. Just a bit tired. I’m just really really over feeling under the weather. It will be three weeks on Sunday and that’s about two weeks too long. I keep hoping each morning when I open my eyes that I’ll check out my body and I’ll feel that finally this is the day that I’ve turned the corner. No such luck so far. Hope springs eternal.
Not much happened on the rest of my brief visit to Seattle. I spent most of my time visiting with family, writing, and watching bad TV. Not much of import happened other than my sister producing a very good family dinner of linguini with clams at her house on Sunday night. Would have been better with a good glass of wine but I’m avoiding alcohol at the moment other than the medicinal amounts in NyQuil so as not to exacerbate anything. Monday was devoted to the return trip and, for the first time in five years, Sea-Tac airport was not a complete zoo when I stepped off the light rail to check in for my flight back to the southland. Bag drop and security lines were both properly staffed and functioned as designed. I was gobsmacked.
Fortunately both this week and next week are relatively light weeks at work so I should get in enough rest time outside of work to shake this puppy for once and for all. And once I do, I plan on nailing this particular virus in a lead coffin and tossing it overboard several miles offshore in the Gulf of (insert your preferred geographical term here) as I never want to see it again. It should also give me the time to tackle the next major domestic chore – the taxes. And I’m still trying to catch up on the writing assignments due to my publisher. I have clawed my way forward on some, but I’m still a few weeks behind on the schedule as it exists in my head.
So what’s going on in the world? The House of Representatives passed a resolution to allow a ‘Big Beautiful Budget Bill’ which will be stuffed with tax cuts for those with more money than they can possibly spend and draconian cuts to those with the least. I wrote a bit about what the proposed Medicaid cuts will do if made law last time I wrote one of these essays. None of that is off the table as only one Republican, Thomas Massie, found the spine to stand up and say that this sort of gutting of services is wrong and not who we are. It’s not law yet. It will have to pass the house still as a budget, requiring the Republican party to go on record as specifically voting to take a meat cleaver to Medicaid (and a lot of their constituents are going to be shocked when they find out that’s what pays for their kids and mom in the nursing home and very little of it is going to fictitious Cadillac driving welfare queens in some far off big city). One can hope that the Senate will hold the line some but I’m not sure about anything these days when it comes to members off congress which makes me wonder what hold to the powers that be have on them (and what sort of data have Elon and the muskrats been vacuuming out of various archives that they don’t wish to have publicized).
I’ve always loved Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and find Ebenezer Scrooge a fascinating character. When we first meet him, he’s a miser, a misanthrope and a thoroughly odious human being whom we later learn through the visits of the ghosts was not always that way, but was self created due to fear, generational trauma, and bad choices. At the end, he is the same person, only returned to who and what he should have been had he made different choices earlier in life and if he had not been as badly scarred as he was by others. I got to play him once in a production that used most of the original Dickensian language. It was interesting figuring out all of those psychological underpinnings. The story is a cultural touchstone as we identify with the redemptive arc. If Scrooge remained the man we first meet, no one would have read the piece after about 1845,
The current Republican party is perfectly embodying Scrooge in his counting house on Christmas Eve. It’s mistreating the workers of the nation, begrudging them every little pleasure, feeling that they are not worth the pittance they are being paid. It has no interest in supporting a more charitable view of the world when it comes calling looking for a donation. In it’s withholding of social services and health care, it is fulfilling Scrooge’s axiom ‘If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population’. Unfortunately, I don’t see the ghosts of Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson visiting the leadership in the depths of the night to give them moral clarity. It’s going to take things causing pain to the professional and upper classes before there’s likely to be much shift. Or a complete blowout in the 2026 midterms.
On the public health front, there are a few things of note. The measles outbreak in West Texas continues to grow with the first child now dead. (The first measles death in the US in ten years). More are likely to die. A number of people have asked if they should get a MMR booster. If you have had the disease or the two shot MMR booster, you carry life long immunity and you should not need to do anything. There is one caveat: if your two MMR shots were between 1957 and 1968 (when they reformulated the vaccine), there is a chance that your immunity may be low and a booster might be advisable. (I had a booster in the 1990s when I was in an area of an outbreak so I know I’m OK). A number of people are asking me if they should bring their vaccinations up to date given the new administration. I have no idea what will happen to vaccine availability going forward so it’s not a bad idea. Ask your doctor. I’m caught up with everything other than RSV so I’ll go get that sometime after I stop coughing up my bronchial tree.
The H5N1 bird flu continues to be of concern. It continues to spread through poultry flocks and dairy herds (don’t expect the price of eggs to come down in the near future). There are some strains in Wyoming that are showing mutations that will make it easier to spread in humans increasing the likelihood of pandemic spread at some point. We’re not there yet and there’s no reason to panic. There’s just two things to keep in mind. First, H5N1 has a mortality rate in humans of up to 50%. (Coin flip whether you live or die if you get it). If that sort of mortality were to happen in healthy working populations, we could no longer function as a society. Second, the current administration is busy destroying all of the tools we would need in order to identify and contain a rapidly spreading virus before it becomes pandemic. In a lot of ways, we’re in a worse position now than we were five years ago when Covid began to spread.
As I start to read some of the reasoning behind MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), it reads very similar to the social hygiene/eugenics movements of the last century, the attempt to prevent lesser humans (however you want to define that) from reproducing and taking from societal resources. The belief is that those resources should be reserved solely for the industrious and the deserving. I can see a wish for a doomsday pandemic to sweep through and clear out ‘the dead wood’ so that the healthy trees can flourish in the aftermath. It’s a dangerous philosophy with so many slippery slopes that I really don’t feel like going into it at the moment. All I can do is implore those of you with differing political opinions to please think carefully about what you are supporting and where it leads. There are many, many exemplars through history and not one of them ends well.
In the meantime, I filed my five bullet points, haven’t received a termination notice, and I’m going to continue to provide the best care I can to a population that’s frail and vulnerable and just as deserving of the fruits of society as any other.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 