25- Thank you, Governor Stein, for not kotowing to the CDC

Did you get your covid booster shot in May like I told you? You know after RFK Jr. started his bs at the department? When the department first announced that boosters were only for those 65 years and older or those with preconditions but had not yet enacted it?

My husband immediately got an appointment and the booster. I immediately got an appointment and the booster. We both got boosters on May 21 of this year.

Do I remember exactly what spooked me about this entire situation? Apparently the FDA came out on May 20 with an article that I saw in Stat News.

The shenanigans are afoot again. Always, forever…

Now that the CDC has approved the new booster shot for the flu/covid season 2025 there is a discrepancy of which states will give you a vaccine/booster without a prescription. Or even with a prescription.

It is a hot icky mess.

Just as was designed by HHS.

Some states have come out as needing a prescription. If the pharmacy even has it.

Some states have not.

Nine states require individual prescriptions for a vaccine. At least at the writing of my source article from PBS dated September 12, 2025. In the four days since this article was written 3 other states have issued orders to make the covid vaccine available to their citizens. These are Arizona, Maine, and North Carolina. Hence the reason I am thanking Josh Stein in the post title.

To look on the bright side 41 do not. Soon to be 44. Six states that still require a prescription for even those eligible for the vaccine are Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah, and West Virginia, plus D.C.

That’s even if the pharmacies are stocking the vaccine.

Rather a game of three card monte. Here a vaccine for the prescribed, there a vaccine for anyone who meets the threshold. Everywhere a vaccine. Confusing right?

Trust me, that is the entire fucking point. It’s as if the CDC wants to make it so confusing that people will throw up their hands and give up.

Too bad, CDC and HHS, those of us who’ve lived and survived since March 2020 know better. We know that this virus is a killer. We know that this virus disables through Long Covid. And we do not wish that on our worst enemy.

We are tired of the dead and the double speak and the ghoul in charge of it all.

Tuesday Top of Mind 5/25/25- Be careful, germs are still trying to kill you

In a stunning surprise to no one who is interested in anything other than pursuing power and strengthening the echo chamber in which they live, this past however many days it has been since the inauguration and the shameful confirmation of an avowed anti-vaxxer to the chair of HHS has been an exercise in what the fuck.

Seriously though, is this man and his ilk interested in anything besides the cockamamie bullshit they believe, to the detriment of, well, everyone in the US.

Let’s count the says his administration of HHS has gone.

Number one is his insistence that, against all medical judgement and against swift action of diseases that we know are trying to kill us, that all vaccines must have an extra layer of blinded nonsense, a placebo barrier. The only thing that ‘obecalp’ ever did was kill people. (that is placebo spelled backward, they came up with this nonsense in the 1990s. It is basically a sugar pill to make you think you are being treated. Additional nonsense is up to and including the appointment of a known vaccine skeptic and all around terrible human and has no medical degree, David Geier, to investigate for the umpteenth time the debunked, but very real in their heads, link between vaccines and autism.

Maybe this time they will get an answer they think proves what they think. Spoiler alert, doing research with a foregone conclusion in your head is a terrible way to go about doing research.

THREE HUNDRED Americans are dying and will continue to die every week because of covid.

Yeah, still.

Bet you didn’t hear about that.

That is over one thousand a month.

Last week when the news broke that they were no longer recommending updated covid vaccines to those under 65, I immediately, without hesitation, made a covid appointment for the very next day. Not only that, I immediately texted my husband to make his own appointment. Again, for the very next day. This nonsense was released on Wednesday and by noon on Thursday we both had been vaccinated.

Other vaccine recommendation changes include that the vaccine is not recommended if you are under 65. Unless you have a concurrent comorbidity and are over 50, luckily obesity in the US is 40.3%. Otherwise you are out of luck. Today, they announced a stop to recommending that healthy children are no longer to get the covid vaccine. Never mind the one thousand and eighty six children who died from covid during what they consider the active pandemic. Taken against the estimated number of children in the US of 73,602,753, this comes out to a mortality rate of 0.0015%.

Not significant but not immaterial. Especially to the one thousand and eighty six families.

And whose definition of healthy?

Nothing was ever gained by denial and thrusting our heads into the sand.

Today HHS also came out against recommending the covid vaccine for pregnant women. Why? No idea. Because we know there is a link between covid infection and miscarriage. According to a study in the Lancet that Covid infection before or during pregnancy was associated with a two- to threefold increase in risk of miscarriage before 20 weeks. And since we already know that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, I feel that this is vastly short sighted.

Par for the course.

Of course, covid data is HARD to come by.

As if no one wants us to look at it.

Gee, I wonder why? (this is heavy sarcasm)

Congratulations to us! After canceling the meeting to decide on the 2025 flu vaccine, the FDA got their heads out of their collective asses and chose three viruses to include in the vaccine. Of course, selecting the viruses to be included is always a crap shoot. Just ask the 20,000 Americans who died of the flu in the 2024/2025 flu season.

Let me tell you, as a working nurse in the hospital during flu season and one who monitors bed usage and ER bed availability in my spare time, this last season was the worst one in years.

Tuberculosis remains a threat to school children in Kansas. Why is this important to know? TB kills the most people per year around the world. True it is most common in crowded living conditions. Like in jails or the new housing model for gen z. This is also known as pod living where you rent a bed (pod) in a house with other gen zers.

This most current outbreak in Kansas is still of concern. But you don’t hear of it, do you?

This bring us the third disease in our merry go round of death in America 2025, measles. There have been one thousand and forty six known cases in 31 states. Slightly less than the children who died of covid since 2020 (that we know of) but there have only been three deaths in this latest outbreak. Of course, two of them were children.

Yep, still a thing. Still spreading like wildfire because it is the most contagious illness in the world.

It is as if they want the immuno-compromised to die. After all, we spend sooooooooooooooooooooooooo much money on the chronically ill in America. According to the NIH, over ONE TRILLION dollars a year.

Do you see why medical professionals like me are concerned?

No.

Okay, well get your vaccinations. While you can.

I turn 50 in July and 50 is the age they offer the shingles vaccine. You bet I will be getting it the first week.

Idle question that popped into my head as I was finishing this, what happens if the autism rate goes up without vaccines? Or are they just “kidding”.

Tuesday Top of Mind 3/11/2025-Happy Birthday, Covid-19.

Happy Birthday, Covid-19.

It was 5 years ago today that the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic.

The post I wrote last year on this date was that I was at work. Of course I was at work. I wrote that lockdown and elective cases stoppage, masks were a few days away.

Listen.

The WHO and the CDC and Anthony Fauci did the best they could with the wildly gyrating situation that was wrestling with a very deadly, very real pandemic.

Most people don’t care about that.

Most people only care about how a situation impacts them. Until they or their family member is the one on the vent. Or can’t get a bed because there are literally no beds or no vents available.

Remember New York? And the thousands of people who were sick in late winter, early spring, all the way to summer 2020? Remember the refrigerator truck morgues waiting outside of hospitals? Remember the Of course you don’t.

But those of us in healthcare that were sidelined because of the pause in elective cases remember. Well, some of us do.

Some of us who worked on the front lines in those dark days remember. Even if it makes us sad.

There was just a spike in December/January. Not that the U.S. would know. The current death toll on the CDC website is 735 in the first week of March 2025. The total death toll is hard to find at the CDC site and I spent a lot of time poking around looking for it.

The global death rate for covid is 7,090,890. It is hard to get a current death toll for the U.S, but I did find a number on the Worldometer site. That number is one million, two hundred nineteen thousand, four hundred eighty-seven. Americans dead from covid in 5 years.

Spare me the explanation that some of those dead in the U.S. were illegal immigrants.

Remember that it is still sickening people and they are being hospitalized, sometimes on vents? Yes, even today.

Covid taught the world many lessons.

However, it also gave rise to rampant misinformation and death threats against the very people who were trying to help us survive.

Remember that?

So Happy Birthday, Covid-19. May the lessons that you tried to teach us about humanity and resilience sink in someday. Preferably before the next pandemic.

We are flying blind and, as a healthcare worker and registered nurse, these remain scary times. Not only because 75% of the population shrug and go on with their lives, but because the U.S. has left the WHO and the CDC is likewise hamstrung. Research dollars and research at the major research centers, such as universities, are being affected by what they can research and what they can’t. And that list is horrifyingly anti-women, anti-LGBTQIA, and anti-science.

Good times to be in research. (This is sarcasm. So much sarcasm.)

Tuesday Top of Mind 12/17/24- Your grandparents would be rolling over in their graves if they knew!

I am not going to ask how we got here. It’s bad enough that we are here.

By that I mean the rampant feeling by some LOUD segment of the population that vaccines aren’t important. So unimportant that they don’t want them and, furthermore, their children don’t want them. Yes, I know that is grammatically incorrect.

They feel that the diseases that are currently being vaccinated against are a thing of the past. After all, THEY never heard of anyone getting whooping cough, or tetanus, or measles. And THEY certainly never had it themselves.

Now the anti-vaccinator himself, RFK Jr., has ingratiated himself into an essential job at the government level. He will be handed control of the Health and Human Services. This is a man who caused a fatal outbreak of measles in Samoa tby peddling his snake oil and misinformation about vaccines.

This man is not a doctor.

Like the yummy mummies on social media who are anti-vaxers and never expose their precious offspring to “chemicals” like di-hydrogen monoxide, that’s water, by the way. Until one of their children comes out with a PREVENTABLE disease, like influenza or measles, and dies. Then comes the rending of the clothes and the gnashing of the teeth and the wailing and fake tears. And the claims that no one told them that precious little Timmy-kins could die. After all, they just wanted to fit in with Tiffiny and Karin.

Spare me.

I’ve only read examples of death by tetanus. This is where your muscles lock up so tightly because of the toxin. The muscles are so rigid that bones break. Sounds horrible and not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. If I had any enemies, that is.

My great, great-aunt died of pertussis in the 1930s, even though a vaccine had been developed in 1914. The vaccine wasn’t widely used until the 1940s.

The DTP (diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus) vaccine is a 3 vaccine for 1 shot deal. The caveat is that it only lasts for 10 years.

The flu shot is widely available, beginning in the fall. This is a yearly vaccine that everyone should get. After all, 28,000 people died of the flu in 2023 and the young, the old, and the immunocompromised are at risk, even with a vaccine.

Is this ringing a bell?

Same things we said about the covid vaccine and there were still millions of people who died worldwide. How many? We don’t know because they STOPPED collecting/reporting the data.

Your grandparents and great-grandparents lost children to what we can now prevent and would look at you in disappointment when you decide to listen to disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield and his many, many, many, many times disproven paper that linked vaccines and autism.

Double spare me.

Better yet, spare your kids.

Tuesday Top of Mind 1/30/24-1460 days of covid

On my Facebook memories from 2023, the Dispatches from the Evening Shift post was a Monday musing from 1/30/23 was 1095 days of covid. I thought, well, it’s been a minute since I wrote about covid.

Let me take the local temperature of covid.

Yes, there was a winter surge. As predicted. The hospitals were full; the hospital I work at seems to be always full. There was flu, and RSV, and covid. Just like last year.

According to the CDC Covid Data Tracker, there have been 26,607 hospitalizations for covid in the US in the week of January 20, 2024. This is down from 28,323 hospitalizations for covid in the US in the week of January 22, 2023. The weekly death rate has been averaging 1800 American dead each week. That is still a substantial number, for all that the public is bored hearing about covid. The most current number of dead, as reported, which is suspect because of the patchwork reporting done by some states, is one million, one hundred seventy-two thousand, two hundred two.

The CDC Codiv Data Tracker has improved its reporting and ease of information finding. This was always my second choice for covid data. RIP Johns Hopkins Covid Dashboard.

Covid is still here. People are still dying.

The best way to protect yourself and your family members is to make sure you’ve had the most current booster. Get tested if you are sick. Stay home if you are sick. If you feel the need to go to the hospital because of difficulty breathing, or low oxygen saturation, go to the hospital. According to my county’s tracker, 12.8% of those who presented to the hospital were admitted.

Not very exciting, I know. But important to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.

No, I can’t believe I am still writing about this shit nearly 4 years after the first recognition that this might be bad. It’s not as bad as it was, but it is still not good.

Tuesday Top of Mind 12/5/23-Gap in the data

My brain is right now about finding data gaps in the nursing research. This is to aid me in my doctoral classes and I think I’ve found one. Both in the doctoral classes.

And in the current covid pandemic numbers.

What covid pandemic numbers?

You say you haven’t seen any covid pandemic numbers in months. You even didn’t know it was still a thing. Mostly because you don’t care. It has killed as many as it is going to kill and other things are more important to you.

I get it, I do. But that’s just it; we don’t know about current numbers. All we get are dribs and drabs of numbers, sometimes, if the wind is right. Otherwise, no one is reporting numbers right now.

At a glance at the current numbers here in my town, the data is lagging a bit. The last numbers are from November 3-November 16 and apparently, the covid risk is low. 11% of those who presented to the hospital with covid like symptoms got admitted, but the covid risk is low.

79% of the covid samples are from 2 dominant strains-Omicron XBB and Omicron XE. The most current variant that is in the news is BA.2.6, according to the CDC. Even that update is from 11/27/23.

That is the point.

The data are weak. When we get it at all.

There certainly is a lot more to capture our attention. Is covid a victim of the news cycle because there is something sexier to talk about that gets attention?

Yep.

Inflation, the holidays, and wars.

Lions, tigers, and bears indeed.

Oh my.