During the height of her popularity a prominent Tampa disc jockey used to call her Olivia Neutron Bomb...she was a hottie for sure. Cancer
A guy I used to work with went to the doctor a month ago complaining of back pain. They checked and found cancer in his spine and in much of the rest of his body. He died last weekend. ☹️
~10 years ago, I walked into a place I used to work and discovered that a former coworker (who was a few years younger than me) had died. When I asked what happened, I found out that she'd been complaining of back pain for months, but couldn't go to the doctor because she didn't have insurance. When she was finally able to get in the low-cost clinic for people who have jobs but are uninsured, she found out that she had cancer, and when they operated on her, it had spread so much in her system that there wasn't anything that they could really do. It cost about $2 billion (or so) to develop the mRNA vaccines used to fight COVID, there's a number of mRNA vaccines in the pipeline for treating cancer. The idea for mRNA vaccines had been around for decades, but since vaccines are an unsexy/low-margin business (even with the government picking up the bulk of the R&D costs), there wasn't a lot of movement towards developing vaccines using the methods until shortly before COVID hit (then it took off like a rocket). We spent $1+ trillion on the war in Iraq, if we'd had stayed out of Iraq, and poured just a portion of that money on mRNA vaccines, we'd probably have vaccines for a number of deadly cancers by now. The 13 most common cancers in the US kill nearly half a million Americans a year. So, for the 10 years we were really occupying Iraq, that's 5 million people dead from cancer. How many of them could have been saved if we'd just spent that money on anti-cancer mRNA vaccines?
