‘While other nations have criminalized misinformation/disinformation about the vaccines, the US has been weak in fighting this with scientific data, leading to vaccine hesitancy that promotes infection, the spread of the virus, and more than a million deaths.’
THE average life expectancy in the United States “dropped for a second straight year from 2020 to 2021, with the COVID-19 pandemic once again playing an outsize role in the decline,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This has been the lowest since 1996, dropping from 77.0 years to 76.1. The USA had the largest drop since World War II, with a fall from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 in 2020, and now down to 76.1. That’s a 2.7-years drop from three years ago! On the other hand, the life expectancy in the Philippines is 71.41 years in 2021, a surprising increase of 0.18 percent from 2020.
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Chinese authorities have locked down Chengdu, a southwestern city with 21 million people, because of a surge in COVID-19, according to AP. Around 70 percent of the flights to and from that city had been suspended. Those with special needs (negative test) are allowed to leave the city. If China had locked down Wuhan City when the novel coronavirus was first detected there on December 8, 2019, this catastrophic pandemic that devastated the economies of 230 nations and areas around the globe (more than 610 million COVID-19 cases and greater than 6.5 million deaths worldwide; almost 97 million cases in the USA, with higher than 1 million deaths; and, more than 3.9 million cases in The Philippines and greater than 62,000 deaths), could have been avoided. It could have been contained and kept within Wuhan, preventing COVID-19 from spreading to other parts of China and to various nations around the globe.
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California legislators are considering a bill aimed at disciplining physicians who disseminate false information or misinform people about COVID-19 infection, vaccines, etc. While other nations have criminalized misinformation/disinformation about the vaccines, the US has been weak in fighting this with scientific data, leading to vaccine hesitancy that promotes infection, the spread of the virus, and more than a million deaths.
But why zero in on physicians only? Isn’t this discriminatory against a certain profession? Anyone spreading fake news, misinformation, doctors or lawyers, or engineers, or politicians, or lay people, about the vaccines, masking, distancing, and treatment of COVID-19 (or other illnesses), on social media or on any medium, could equally kill people, and the victims not less dead than those misinformed by physicians. The law should include everyone guilty of this potentially deadly crime. If they want to mete a harsher sentence to guilty physicians, that’s fine with me because we, physicians, took an oath to protect the health and safety of our patients. Any physician who commits a crime is a disgrace to the medical profession. But a law must be just and fair for all. All others committing the same crime should also be commensurately punished and not exempt simply because they are not physicians.
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The US-FDA has cleared the first redesigned COVID vaccines since they came out in late 2020. This reformulated bivalent vaccine booster targets Omicron (BA.4, BA.5) subvariants, the currently predominant viruses. The Pfizer made version is for persons as young as 12, and the Moderna vaccine for 18 and older. These improved vaccines may be given also to those who had booster shots as long as the last shot was at least two months ago. These reformulated shots are most welcome since COVID-19 infections still averages around 90,000 infections and 475 deaths every day. The government is warning the people who think COVID-19 is gone that the country could see 100 million cases in the coming fall and winter. If we are having nearly 500 deaths a day now, you can imagine how many lives could be lost with 100 million cases. Life is precious. Let us protect it, since we have no spare.
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Philip S. Chua, MD, FACS, FPCS, a Cardiac Surgeon Emeritus based in Northwest Indiana and Las Vegas, Nevada, is an international medical lecturer/author, Health Advocate, newspaper columnist, and Chairman of the Filipino United Network-USA, a 501(c)3 humanitarian foundation in the United States. Websites: FUN8888.com, Today.SPSAtoday.com, and philipSchua.com Email: scalpelpen@gmail.com
