“At the interpersonal level, people can help to normalize vaccination as the standard among their friends and family–not by lecturing or hectoring, simply by openly sharing that they themselves are vaccinated. Health care providers also have a role to play in de-sensationalizing the issue and making discussions about COVID vaccination a more routine …
During the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic (April 2021), I became a high-school pharmacy technician. My senior year of high school ended in gray scrubs, gloves, and a mask. While I knew I was signing up for long hours of selling medication and administering COVID tests, I was not prepared for what else I would learn.
On my first day on the job, a couple approached me and asked …
It started as the “Chinese virus.” Then the “kung flu.” Then came the boycotts of Chinatowns, the rise in harassment, assaults, and murders. The recognition of hate and discrimination against Asian Americans was long overdue. However, anti-Asian racism doesn’t just manifest in hate speech or violence; it has undermined the U.S. COVID-19 policy response.
In 2020, American media narratives frequently painted Asian nations’ success in controlling COVID-19 as the result of …
Guess what? The mouth is attached to the rest of the body. And though dentistry and medicine are typically separated from the very beginning of professional training, they are irrevocably linked for patients and have an impact on each other. Here’s some foundational knowledge that will help set the stage for discussing the connection between overall health and oral health: Our mouths are teeming with bacteria – mostly the good, …
It’s a standard instruction during safety demonstrations on airplanes: “In the event of a sudden loss in cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will drop down in front of you. Put your mask on before helping others.”
But why is that? Wouldn’t it make more sense to help those who are most vulnerable?
The answer has to do with the way our bodies react to a lack of oxygen.
When cabin pressure drops, the …
I was at my gym last night. Billy Joel’s ballad about trust was the metronome to my squats. Though vaccinated and boosted, I was wearing my mask. I know the latest evidence about vaccines and natural immunity, the dramatic transmissibility but mild virulence of the latest Omicron variant.
So my mask was only for optics. Someone might recognize me as a doctor in the local hospital where masking is still mandated. …
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and communities had to take rapid and decisive action to protect their citizens against this novel virus. While it was yet unclear how dangerous the COVID-19 infection may be to children, their teachers, and their families, governments quickly shut down schools and activities to slow the spread among the population at large.
Before the pandemic, childhood obesity was already a crisis with …
Tuesday night, March 29 into March 30, I started to feel that sensation I associate with the start of a cold. It was a feeling in the back of my throat that’s almost hard to describe. I haven’t had that sensation in years. Because I have been wearing an N95 mask every time I come into contact with people outside of my inner circle, I hadn’t had any sort of …
Moving into the pandemic’s third year, as many settle into the notorious “new normal” of COVID, the challenge now is avoiding complacency and keeping attention and vaccination rates high enough to maintain protection against the still-evolving virus.
Six months after approving a first vaccine booster, the FDA has now authorized a second booster dose for older and immunocompromised people at greater risk of serious illness. With new variants …
“Pfizer has a particular onus to help intervene globally as one of the largest and most profitable pharmaceutical companies in the world. With its immense capital power, Pfizer should shift some of their spending from national ads promoting their vaccine product in a country that has large booster vaccine availability …
A small piece of lint is tickling my nose as I am desperately trying not to sneeze into the tight-fitting mask on my face. I know that I will not be able to adjust the mask as my gloves are sterile, and I am standing suspended over a patient’s body with my gloves patinaed with small drips of blood mixed with an antiseptic. The procedure is challenging as the patient …
These last two years have been extremely challenging for most health care professionals. Watching society challenge essential health and science principles that we have known to be fact has been difficult to bear. Being villainized, health care workers went from being hailed “health care heroes” to being the target of hate, violence, and disregard.
These past few years have been a year of reckoning in many ways. The COVID-19 pandemic has …
In the coming months, no one can predict with certainty what will happen with the war in Ukraine. But there’s one thing we do know for sure. The United States will soon reach an unthinkable milestone: One million Americans will have died of COVID-19. Over the last month, while many people were celebrating the rollback of mask mandates and other pandemic restrictions, over 1,000 Americans continued to quietly succumb to …
“It was probably in early 1803, as Jenner’s fame swelled and more doctors were adopting vaccination, when Bell met a farmer with a curious story. The farmer’s name was Benjamin Jesty, from the Downshay farm in a nearby village. Seeing the growing practice of vaccination, Jesty was eager to …
FDA and Health Canada recently approved Paxlovid as an oral treatment option for mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who are at high risk of progression to severe COVID-19. It is a combination drug containing nirmatrelvir/ritonavir. Nirmatrelvir works by binding to SARS-CoV-2 3CL protease to ultimately stop viral replication. Ritonavir does not have any antiviral activity against COVID-19 but increases concentrations of nirmatrelvir by decreasing its metabolism by CYP3A4 enzyme. Ritonavir is …
“With government and industry working hand in hand, we can develop and stockpile monoclonal antibody therapeutics in anticipation of variants to come. We need to be thinking several moves ahead to keep ahead of variants so that stockpiles of therapies do not become obsolete as they have now. Our …
“That year, 2020, Uğur told the crowd, would be the year BioNTech proved the doubters wrong.
There was no time to lose. Soon after he’d finished his talk, Uğur hopped on a plane to Seattle, where he met with a team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which had …
Since the beginning of COVID-19, we have recognized the truth of philosopher George Santayana’s oft-quoted 1905 writing — “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — and looked for lessons from the 1918 Spanish flu, the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century. Much was different, yet so much the same. There was no testing, treatments, or ability to prevent the virus then beyond shutdowns, masking, distancing, …
“You were doing it wrong.”
The patient in my pulmonary clinic for follow-up after her discharge from a hospitalization in January of this year for COVID-19 pneumonia was explaining why she would not reconsider getting vaccinated despite her recent illness.
I told her I had been seeing people die from this disease for the last two years; I wanted to prevent others from suffering from severe illness and death—like her.
“People were dying …
The world is constantly trying to keep up with the latest COVID-19 variant – from Alpha to Omicron and now Omicron’s cousin BA.2, we have seen how contagious and virulent these variants can be. Viruses are wily adversaries, and they mutate both to avoid detection and to defeat the body’s immune responses from vaccines and previous infections.
Even if vaccines continue to be effective at preventing severe illness and death from …
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