First up? Science!
Isn't it at least a little bit ironic that so many science deniers, whether it's climate science or vaccine science or teaching science in schools, are so eager to see people move forward with experimental uses of drugs to fight the coronavirus?
And also isn't it at least a little bit ironic that the folks who say the virus is "a deep state hoax" and "the numbers are a lie" are also gung ho (on social media, anyway, where everything is true...) about drugs like remdisivir? Why would we need to work so hard to solve for something that isn't even a problem?
And isn't it also ironic that, when people are so demanding of other scientists, across a wide spectrum of applications, even down to their political affiliation, none of the same people seem remotely concerned that the tests we're seeing for these drugs frequently don't include control groups, so we don't really understand how they're working compared to people getting a different drug or a placebo?
I totally understand the desire to have some kind of therapeutic meds available to help treat people who end up getting infected with the coronavirus, but I also think that we should practice good science, including informed consent, and trials done under commonly accepted scientific practices - not just fast science, no matter how good the intentions.
I totally understand the desire to have some kind of therapeutic meds available to help treat people who end up getting infected with the coronavirus, but I also think that we should practice good science, including informed consent, and trials done under commonly accepted scientific practices - not just fast science, no matter how good the intentions.
Next up? Geography!
I find it at least somewhat ironic that the people who have long complained about how upstate New York - the real upstate, which includes Central NY, Northern NY, the Southern Tier, Western New York, the Fingerlakes region, the Adirondacks, and the Capitol District - is constantly being screwed and all our money is being stolen to pay for New York City and so on, to the point where we should split the state to get away from downstate are now all up in arms about two things that happened long ago, but only suddenly are hot topics.
The first issue? Gov. Cuomo not purchasing 16,000 ventilators back in 2015. These folks would have been apoplectic at the thought of the Sonofa Gov spending more than half a billion dollars on ventilators that would be sitting in a warehouse somewhere, doing nothing for who knows how many years, absent a pandemic like the 1918 flu, which at the time was nearly a century back in our rear-view mirror. But because Donald Trump said it on a Fox Town Hall from the Rose Garden, this is now a fact - Cuomo failed to by ventilators. Never mind the "empty cupboards" of the Strategic National Stockpile, which the current administration failed to refill - because that's different, or something.
The second issue? The realization that many hospital beds have been closed in New York, most of them in New York City where the impact of the coronavirus is being felt most intensely. The anti-Cuomo, anti-downstate folks have been complaining about that as well, because the virus is only an issue there, it's hardly having any impact here and now we are going to have to take their sick people because there aren't any hospital beds for them.
And why aren't there any beds? Here's an op-ed in the NY Post from 2013 on hospital closures, written by the chair of the Pataki administration's Berger Commission, who said that (at that time) 18 hospitals across the state had been closed, including 12 in New York City. That's something that people up here would have been happy about, no longer throwing good tax dollars - good upstate tax dollars - out the window.
But now, also from the NY Post from March of this year, we learn that NY has thrown away thousands of hospital beds and that's going to make it harder for the state to deal with the pandemic.
What can we learn from these at least a little ironic lessons? A few things, I think.
I find it at least somewhat ironic that the people who have long complained about how upstate New York - the real upstate, which includes Central NY, Northern NY, the Southern Tier, Western New York, the Fingerlakes region, the Adirondacks, and the Capitol District - is constantly being screwed and all our money is being stolen to pay for New York City and so on, to the point where we should split the state to get away from downstate are now all up in arms about two things that happened long ago, but only suddenly are hot topics.
The first issue? Gov. Cuomo not purchasing 16,000 ventilators back in 2015. These folks would have been apoplectic at the thought of the Sonofa Gov spending more than half a billion dollars on ventilators that would be sitting in a warehouse somewhere, doing nothing for who knows how many years, absent a pandemic like the 1918 flu, which at the time was nearly a century back in our rear-view mirror. But because Donald Trump said it on a Fox Town Hall from the Rose Garden, this is now a fact - Cuomo failed to by ventilators. Never mind the "empty cupboards" of the Strategic National Stockpile, which the current administration failed to refill - because that's different, or something.
The second issue? The realization that many hospital beds have been closed in New York, most of them in New York City where the impact of the coronavirus is being felt most intensely. The anti-Cuomo, anti-downstate folks have been complaining about that as well, because the virus is only an issue there, it's hardly having any impact here and now we are going to have to take their sick people because there aren't any hospital beds for them.
And why aren't there any beds? Here's an op-ed in the NY Post from 2013 on hospital closures, written by the chair of the Pataki administration's Berger Commission, who said that (at that time) 18 hospitals across the state had been closed, including 12 in New York City. That's something that people up here would have been happy about, no longer throwing good tax dollars - good upstate tax dollars - out the window.
But now, also from the NY Post from March of this year, we learn that NY has thrown away thousands of hospital beds and that's going to make it harder for the state to deal with the pandemic.
New York has lost a staggering 20,000 hospital beds over the last two decades to budget cuts and insurance overhauls, complicating local and state efforts to battle the coronavirus, according to records and experts.Both articles are good reads, presenting the arguments for and against doing something in each of these cases. And in each case, our elected officials, representatives of both major parties, made decisions they thought best for the citizens and taxpayers of New York.
What can we learn from these at least a little ironic lessons? A few things, I think.
- Irony is everywhere.
- What we don't want today we might need tomorrow, so when we get what we want, we may come to regret it.
- Our elected officials are human - and imperfect - as are we.
- Many times, the ideas of one party are the ideas of the other party.
- We'd probably be better served if we focused more on the ideas and less on the people.
- 'We' includes me.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts!