(2021-11-18) ZviM Covid 11/18 Paxlovid Remains Illegal

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 11/18: Paxlovid Remains Illegal.

Executive Summary
Rise in cases is accelerating. Winter is coming.
Paxlovid remains illegal.

The Numbers

Winter is coming

cases are likely to more than double before we peak again and it would be unsurprising if our case numbers peaked similarly to where they peaked a year ago.

Deaths

Deaths continued to decline because they lag cases. With cases rising again, this trend should reverse shortly, and death counts will begin rising again within two weeks

This year, I notice almost all of my worry is about the reaction to the coming wave

mostly I am worried about all the Covid-19 prevention that will result from this

if you have something you’d like to do a few weeks from now, it’s better to do it now while you still can and can do it safer. However, after that, Paxlovid is coming, which will make things dramatically safer again, so as long as that goes smoothly Christmas should be fine, and I’m not worried about the vacation I have planned for January.

Vaccinations

This piece by Chris Arnade, called Among the Unvaccinated is a lot of where we are at. Consider reading the whole thing. The core takeaway is that being unvaccinated is core to these people’s identities

Sufficiently strong coercion still does seem to mostly work.

They’re holding on to this so tightly that a new trend (as always, how widespread it actually is isn’t clear) seems to be ‘detox’ to ‘undo’ one’s vaccination.

Needless to say, this is not a physical thing one can do

Vaccine Mandates

Paxlovid Remains Illegal

Paxlovid will be approved by the FDA in December. Until then, Paxlovid must remain illegal.

Washington Examiner points out the obvious, that the FDA is killing thousands of people by delaying Pfizer’s and Merck’s Covid treatments. It’s good to state simple things simply

Over the next 35 days, Paxlovid could prevent tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. But instead, the FDA won’t immediately let Pfizer sell a drug it knows to be lifesaving.

NPIs Including Mask and Testing Mandates

When can vaccinated children, forced to attend schools, stop also being forced to wear masks? This NPR story asks a bunch of people that question, and gets widely varying answers

Long Covid

It is always interesting when different studies live in completely different universes.

In Other News

Biden finally nominated someone to head the FDA. Manchin, without whom nothing ever happens in Washington these days, responds by opposing him due to ‘ties with pharmaceutical companies.’

Not Covid

Point of Order: Substack Ho?

This post was drafted using the Substack editor, as a test. My tentative conclusion is that it performed quite well aside from inability to paste from spreadsheets