SARS II: Respiratory Boogaloo

The article has a Flesch-Kincaid reading level of Grade 7, meaning my 10-year-old grandkid could understand it. How long are you going to make excuses for yourself?

Page 200 for me...

333

200. Seems like fake news.

ah yes! It depends on your settings. But on my end it's 500 - if I were a superstitious man I'd be looking over my shoulder.

maybe Dominion is messing up my page count.

Given you're incapable of seeing what's right in front of you, it couldn't hurt.

Is the number of the Anti-"Bob."

oh shit that's right!

Welp, I called the VA about something else entirely and because I mentioned I worked for Amazon, she scheduled me for a vaccine next week

Gonna take it, if only to be an example to my family that it's actually safe for black folks. I don't go out much and the five years I've had from my job have all been negative and I was fine with waiting for older folks who want it to get it, but....

My business partner is under 40 and his insurance company set him up with an appointment for tomorrow. Not sure how he qualified (he is obese, but I don't if that had anything to do with it). I told him not to ask any questions, just show up as directed. I'm not opposed to the priority system, but the most important thing in my eyes is to get as many shots administered as possible, regardless of whether someone qualifies. I hope your example does some good. There's plenty of reason for black people to mistrust the medical establishment, but in this case, that distrust could be hazardous. Good on you for stepping up.

My upbringing was a bit different from many black folks.

I've mentioned before that my mom's side is pretty mixed. Had a white granny who was a nurse and a mixed mom who was the youngest daughter of seven kids, so "no" is no something she heard a lot of growing up. I lucked up with a dad who paid for my insurance until I was 12 so I never spent time on the community clinics like my half-brother with overworked interns or straight up quacks who stopped giving a shit in the 1970s.

All of this is to say that between that and...a noticeable gap in my cultural education (the same one that led me down the Tea Party rabbit hole here ), I never developed the fear older people (and even many my age) have about doctors. I'm aware prejudice exists in medicine still but I'll be damned if I'm gonna just roll over to die, either. If wypipo gonna kill me, they gonna have to work for it

334.

Timely.

By official tallies.

When the dust has all settled and we have more reliable statistics based on excess deaths, I expect that to go up by somewhere between 10 and 20%.

Please tell me that isn't "a thing"...

why wouldn't it be? Tuskegee wasn't that long ago. That was some horrendously criminal shit right there.

There is a long history here in the states with the medical community behaving badly toward the black community ranging from, at least, immoral, to at worst, torture. Most recently in New York thousands of black people with covid being turned away from hospitals. Then there's the Tuskegee Syphilis Study OF mentioned. Gynecologists performing procedures on black women without anesthesia. Black women who were arrested in the early 1900s were given hysterectomies without their consent.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...vaccine-fears-medical-experiments/4358844001/

That's just one link. Google "why are black people leery of doctors."

And how would any of that show that a vaccine that is safe for white people wouldn't be safe for black people? I'm not following your reasoning here.

I can't recall the name of the study offhand, but there was a trial a few years ago in a combination hypertension med that worked better in Black males than in Caucasians.

Naturally the Tighty Righties got all upsetted because this was obviously "preferential treatment."

There are also the anti-vaxxers spreading their poison, and the numbnuts who are convinced that all vaccines are just an excuse for Gubmint to plant tracking chips in people's arms. This stuff is all over the Internet, and often the layman can't distinguish between a crackpot website by some self-proclaimed "expert" from a reliable source such as WebMD.

You forgot that many people think that if they’re not white, they won’t be given the vaccine. They’ll get a placebo instead.

Stories get passed down through the generations and kids get told from an early age not to trust doctors. Especially if their grandparents were old enough to remember having to go to literal veterinarians for help.

I can't stress how much distrust there is within the community against doctors to the point that even black doctors themselves have posted about their fears.

It's been covered pretty well in the last few posts, so I won't repeat it all, but I hope this is a wake-up call to the medical community about how bigotry hurts us all. It's too late for this pandemic to change minds, but hopefully this will be a wake up call to the medical community that they need to build that trust between their patients of color.

Just gonna leave this story here:

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/sa...-dies-covid-after-racist-treatment-complaints

Probably one of the combos that include hydrochlorothiazide. Works great for black people, while white people generally respond better to ACE inhibitors. I can’t remember the why, but I know HCTZ is first line for black people with hypertension and lisinopril is usually the first one they try for white people.

I can’t take beta-blockers (? I’m sure that’s what my doctor said when she changed my prescription the first time) nor can I take lisinopril. I have to take two pills - hydrochlorothiazide and losartan.

Thanks. I see I misinterpreted your previous post. You getting vaccinated to show that the vaccine is safe for blacks is more of a "black people don't always have to be afraid of doctors" thing than a "they're wrong to think this particular vaccine is safe for whites but harmful to blacks" thing. The latter is how I understood it. Sorry about that.

But with all the kooky conspiracy theories kicking around, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to hear someone claiming that the vaccine puts micro-chip tracers into blacks but not into whites, or some other such nonsense.

I believe it's mostly white Karens -- who have no reason to distrust, given that the entire system is built to serve them and make them comfortable -- going down the lunatic conspiracy theory route.

Unfortunately, I've been seeing those White Karen arguments about vaccines spill over into the black community in recent years. One woman heard from her black doctor that giving the measles vaccine on time gives black children autism and I wanted to punch the fucking screen.

In a bit of irony, even my pro-medicine mom who kept my records to date was asking me not to get the vaccine because she had bought into this shit

Ouch. So many BP medicines are beta blockers, too. I take Bisoprolol/HCTZ, and Benazepril. Between the two, I piss a lot, but if there's ever a fire tornado that spawns above our house, I'll probably not be worried about it.

Back in my hypertension days my doctor started me on Amlodipine. My feet swelled up like elephant legs. A switch to hydrochlorathorazide took care of it. Fringe benefit of the weight loss was that my blood pressure went back to well within normal.

That's good to hear! We've got mom on Amlodipine now, and swelling is an unfortunate side effect, but it's the only thing that keeps her BP down. Before it, she was getting numbers in the 200s/100s.