I would say it is a fact that medical billing has little relationship to actual costs of care. You should do some research on it.
It's also a fact that the real cutting-edge R&D is invariably funded by taxpayers, while pharmaceutical companies spend their budgets creating patentable variants, often cherry-picking studies to show marginal improvements over existing drugs. You should do some research on that, too.
> but it really is the case that we should disabuse ourselves from the notion that one should be entitled to life-saving care.
I couldn't disagree more. If it truly is life-saving (as opposed to death-prolonging) care, we really should _dedicate_ ourselves to the notion that each of us should be entitled to life-saving care. That should be an explicit part of the social contract.
Oh, and btw, society was NOT paying ~100k to keep your dad alive. Assuming you're here in the U.S., if you were looking at medical bills to figure out that number, SURPRISE! those numbers are just made up. (Seriously, they're fiction)
That's not to say that you made the wrong choice with your dad, mind you. We do tend to prolong life way past the point of cruelty in this country.
And also traditionally female-dominated. At a base, cultural level, our society has a very real problem with seeing female-majority professions as actual professions.
> The researchers analyzed health data from 1,104 active male firefighters collected from 2000 to 2010.
Active male firefighters? You mean people whose entire job is predicated upon physical strength? People for whom pushups are essentially an aerobic exercise? People who are in no way representative of the population at large???
In practice, you would just replace the queue with a disorganized rabble of people standing around, where as soon as the person currently being served leaves, there is a mad dash at the one secure spot, which is at the very front.
I feel like I've been a part of a queue like this -- at the airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. It was asinine and infuriating, and just thinking about it makes my blood boil.
Please provide the RCT that shows that vaccinated individuals have similar levels of infection to unvaccinated individuals.
What the RCTs for Pfizer and Moderna showed was that the vaccines reduced the symptomatic infection rate by 95%. But you are misconstruing the language being used if you extend that to say "the vaccine is known to be effective on a symptomatic level". The statement about symptomatic infection just means that it was impractical to have 42,000 people take a COVID nasal swab every day, and therefore they can make no professional scientific statements about the actual rate of infection.
But if you are aware of an RCT that actually established the vaccine as being ineffective at preventing infection, I would love to see it.
EDIT: And yes, I linked to observational data from Israel (TWICE) that showed real-world effectiveness in preventing both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections.
My guess is that nobody really knows the answer to that question. It's also entirely plausible that the only way to have true sterilizing immunity to COVID is to have antibodies to the spike protein. shrugs
No. First off, we still haven't had the level of death that we had in 1918, and almost certainly won't. Second, the narrative of vaccinated individuals being major spreaders of this disease is false. The virus is evolving due to mutations occurring while hopping from one unvaccinated person to another, full stop.
My understanding is that there is very little evidence of vaccinated individuals actually transmitting the original ("wild-type") virus, or even the Alpha variant (obviously, Delta/Gamma are potentially different beasts). This was why we in the United States dropped mask mandates for vaccinated individuals. I don't know why the narrative always reverts to "oh, the vaccines just decrease symptoms", a statement unsupported by evidence.
EDIT: Before I get downvoted completely into oblivion, take a look at the 90% reduction in infections, both symptomatic and asymptomatic, seen in vaccinated individuals in Israel. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33964222/
I think we can all agree that you can't transmit the virus if you yourself don't get infected.
It's also a fact that the real cutting-edge R&D is invariably funded by taxpayers, while pharmaceutical companies spend their budgets creating patentable variants, often cherry-picking studies to show marginal improvements over existing drugs. You should do some research on that, too.