Health & Medicine

Questions continue to circle around the idea of mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for international travel after a November press release from Australian airline Quantas Airways Ltd.

First, the bad news: There are new variants of the coronavirus.

But, good news: The new variants of the virus are no more deadly.

But, bad news again: The new variants are 50 to 70 percent more contagious. 

Maybe you are unaware of this variant news because you’ve made the wise decision to live out the rest of 2021 in a fort you built out of old shoeboxes where no Wi-Fi is allowed.

It is a fascinating thing that one year into this pandemic, we still do not understand who is most vulnerable to serious disease and hospitalization. Yes, there are rules. Lots and lots of rules. And yes, everyone I know tells me they are following the rules, or at least those they choose to follow, and complain that they don’t understand why others aren’t following them. 

Manchester, UK — Authorities in Manchester have found an extremely effective way to reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission at college parties: send students home.

Reading Time: < 1minute President Trump has bragged about the speed with which vaccines have been developed, but he left the actual rollout to underfunded state and local health departments.

The post Vaccine Rollout Isn’t Exactly at Warp Speed appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

As COVID-19 cases in the US and beyond continue to soar, as hospitals continue to be overwhelmed, and as vaccine distribution continues to be uneven, our focus continues to be on the crisis parts of the crisis.

It was good news when Anthony Fauci told us all that Santa had been vaccinated and was good to go. With remote sensing technologies at his disposal, he can now not only tell if you have been bad or good, but also if your oxygen levels and temperature are what they should be.  

As this year draws to an end, with most of us seeing our daily routines curtailed, many will not reflect on this past year as one filled with many positives. But some research has suggested that this change in lifestyle could have inadvertently brought about a positive change for pregnant women.

The year-end review is a journalism trope that endeavors to understand the 12 months that have come before. Usually it’s music or film or something that’s easier to wrap your mind around. With COVID-19, we won’t have a full understanding of the implications to societies, economies, and cultures for years. This collection of stories, then, is not a summation, but rather an early glimpse at what may well be a civilizational shift. Read on and look ahead.

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In March, when COVID-19 was becoming a lived reality with infections skyrocketing and society imploding, a kind of “survival of the fittest” mentality began to circulate in political circles and through online discourse. 

After a year marked by COVID-19–related illness and death, the images of refrigerated trucks carrying vaccine shipments across the country inspire hope that we may finally turn a corner on the pandemic.

This week, when many of us would normally be thinking about getting together, we, unfortunately, go the other way; we embrace social distancing — at arm’s length. 

Whistleblowing is a thankless task. Consider:

Welcome to the first installment of WhoWhatWhy’s new weekly coronavirus roundup. There’s a lot of virus coverage out there, so this feature will give you a dose (poor choice of words) of the latest news. We’ll also zero in on particular issues and dive a little deeper on those. This week, we look at masks.

There are dozens of them hidden across Seattle: So-called safe consumption sites where users take illegal drugs under the watchful eye of medically trained observers. They’ve been operating underground for years.

Months after Florida fully opened its school districts, Miami-Dade has finally put a COVID-19 testing program in place. But it stands alone in the Sunshine State as a surge in coronavirus infections has made Florida only the third state in the country to surpass 1 million cases.

The program will operate in conjunction with the University of Miami to provide free rapid tests to all students.

Reading Time: < 1minute With the second wave of the pandemic raging, Americans are on their own as President Trump remains focused on himself and the Biden administration is still seven weeks away.

The post The ‘Dark Winter’ Has Already Begun. appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Rarely do we have guests back on this podcast after only three months. But then rarely are we in the midst of a global pandemic that is getting worse by the day. A coronavirus vaccine, the holy grail of this pandemic, is still months away. Labs doing the standard nasal swab PCR tests are once again overwhelmed and taking much longer to return results. All the while, people are dying.

The post Time for a Second Opinion appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

— OPINION —

A whistleblower’s claims that immigrants at a federal detention center in Georgia were subjected to unwanted hysterectomies are horrifying. They revive memories of medical abuses in the 20th century such as eugenic sterilizations, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the practice of testing new pharmaceutical drugs on prisoners.