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I'm strongly suspecting the multiple union contracts are a big reason. Especially since the American Postal Workers Union contract is approaching expiration in less than two weeks and some crunch time negotiations are in progress. Would be very bad to try and address this so late in the game. https://apwu.org/news/contract-update-union-management-“locking-down”-ahead-september-20-expiration

Government actively restricts access to safe and proven drugs all the time; that's what prescriptions ensure. For better or worse, we've set the rules in this country that only licensed clinicians get to prescribe certain medicine. You may want ivermectin, but if your physician isn't in agreement with it as a proper course of treatment, they don't have to just acquiesce to you. But the good news is, you can shop for physicians as easily as you do restaurants. Don't like your PCP, keep trying new ones until you're satisifed. A PCP should be on the same level as your barber or mechanic with people you trust and feel a level of comfort around...moreso even.

Yeah, I've seen that and can believe that a great many physicians would read it and think if they go counter to it, they'll either be not giving the best treatment based on their knowledge base, or opening themselves to litigation for ignoring it. Maybe it's because I work in administrative side of a physician practice and have been privy to debates on (non-COVID) policies and protocols during meetings, but the ivermectin debate is really overblown to me. If your physician has read up on it, understands the pros/cons, that's when I'd be fine having it recommended if I were a patient. Now, not many physicians get sufficient admin time to be well versed to the point of an opinion in something so debatable. So for them, recommending it without due diligence on their part, or just because a patient is clamoring for it wouldn't be cool in my mind. Everyday doctors are very smart and can digest information in medical journals a lot faster than us who aren't trained as such...but they have a limited amount of working time, and most of it is spent on clinical shifts, not admin time or research to dive into the details of what amounts to experimental efforts. I have no problem believing plenty of physicians don't understand ivermectin well enough and don't feel comfortable prescribing it counter to official warnings from the FDA, CDC, or their professional associations.

I can absolutely believe facility authorities are doing such. Local CMO's are probably skeptical, or just afraid to step out from cover. My experience in working with physicians is they generally don't like to deviate from guidance their applicable professional association puts out on high button issues. Having what an accrediting body says the standard is helps defend against malpractice in courses of treatment. I'm just unaware of government restrictions as RefeerMac talked about.

What restrictions are there on legal prescriptions of ivermectin? I know there's a lot of medical literature boo-hoo'ing it, but those are references and quite frankly, peer pressure, not prohibitions.

Ivermectin and Hcq are being used as treatments insofar as I know, same as monocular antibodies. Vaccinations are preventative. Two different efforts in the same fight; both need to be tailored to the individual. I still see everything telling us that vaccinations are the best step for an initial defense against the virus. After that, treatments for breakthrough cases take over. I'm fine with whatever folks are using for treatments, I just hope they're doing so in consultation with their physician. Taking ivermectin as prescribed by a doctor make sense. Buying it at the feed store in a package that has a picture of a horse and self medicating is something else.

The language in the EUA has three conditions: there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative. Just because Pfizer is adequate and approved, it doesn't mean it's available in sufficient quantities. I know it sounds like a stretch, but this is why we had multiple companies pushing to make a vaccine...none of them alone could produce sufficient quantities for mass vaccination efforts to the population at large.

Where pray tell is the approval lacking? https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-covid-19-vaccine https://www.fda.gov/media/151710/download As I said, the other two are probably coming soon enough. But with one FDA approved, the legal avenue exists for employee mandates in states without restrictions on it.

If this is going to be the internet story where you link this to forced medical experimentation...that implausible to being with reasoning is completely done for any vaccines with FDA approval (currently Pfizer, presumably soon to be Moderna and J&J).

Thinking of you and the family, @E4 No More, hoping some more positive thoughts help.

@Erik88 hoping your Dad's COVID experience is only an inconvenience.

The death rate is what the media gets to make sensational stories about. I don't want anyone to die, but fell the death rate from COVID as it is today isn't anything society can't handle. That's a broad statement as crass as it sounds; I know each death is a tragedy for the family and friends, so I don't want to belittle that. My worry since March of last year was the contagion of this and how stretched out the entire economy is with regards to what we deem essential services. Staffing in organizations has been tweaked for efficiency and cost savings with the minimal number of people possible, not flexibility by having folks ready to pick up more work, or take over from others. Even if you're 99.99% likely to recover from COVID over time, that doesn't mitigate the risk of your being taken out of the workforce for however long it takes for that recovery to happen, or even if you're asymptomatic, to not be contagious anymore. White collar work from a computer at home can be done in many cases, but we all know society is truly kept running at the first two stages of Maslow's hierarchy of needs by folks who go into work and make things happen, not guys like me who spend most of their day in email and excel spreadsheets. Like other examples I've probably given across the prior 156 pages here...how many nurses and doctors can a hospital lose before they can't see patients...clerks at the grocery store before they can't keep shelves stocked...truckers to deliver products to the aforementioned hospitals and grocery stores before supplies run out. The answer to that question is not very many. Our economy and government services are not ready to absorb casualties like a military unit can still function at some level. Every measure for COVID has been to keep this thing spread out enough so it doesn't overwhelm our systems. I hope they hold, because we're still stress testing it all.

True enough when it comes to death...but there's no denying how contagious it is, and the risk of too many people being so sick they can't safely work at one time for orderly functions as we know them (think truckers or police working at 75% availability).

If we're getting a <0.01% chance of something become the driver of headlines, we're just not going to make it as a society.

Even small impacts of climate change (man made or natural) are a big deal to anyone who produces our food supply, so it should matter to us down the line as consumers in every sense of the word. When those at the production stage are worrying, it's not good. I've not tried the faux meat yet, and don't plan on it anytime soon. But remember, large innovations often enough are shunned by the current generation, then adapted by the next one. This is a generational move underway, so any grumblings on our part may be short lived.

Not the praying type, but would Iike to add all my hopes for your wife to recover and your getting to take her home soon.

Might be his staff didn't get to run this by him before some deadline. Since it involved a private law firm, the funds to pay for it might have been one more admin hurdle. There are a lot of names missing to make me think this was done on the fly just to get it in on time, and summer months are hit or miss for items that aren't essential.

Don't forget to figure out how far you can carry said bag (and any firearms).

One thing COVID did was shine a light at how medical care is developed and delivered in this country...and I'm afraid we were found wanting. I could type up a whole soliloquy about how medical research is different than the delivery of care; how the hospitals needing to run at an income level to cover expenses isn't good enough, they need to return value to shareholders in many cases; and how insurance companies are a leach that keep the doctors and patients locked in some form of bureaucratic combat with each other, and with them. All these things keep better care than we could have from getting to patients. I often see folks say the US has "the best care in the world". We may have the best doctors, and the best procedure skills...but let's not pretend access isn't severely lacking for some. As as much as folks hate government intervention in healthcare, I'm convinced the entire industry would collapse in on itself if Medicare wasn't around, to say nothing of how undignified things would get for the elderly who can't afford it. I think every aspect of this industry had a very ugly 2:55am moment in the club (when the lights come on and you see just how dreary it really is) when push came to shove because of COVID. I got a first hand look at this in my job supporting a provider group in the thick of it. Boy oh boy was it an education, and a worry for the future.

Not enough nurses, huh? Tell me more about this labor shortage in a free market economy where resources can be reallocated to service demand. Yes, I realize this meme post isn't applicable to rural and municipal hospitals...but for our area, having ones that are by SEC required reporting quite profitable, and others that could presumably spend less sponsoring an NFL team...there is a way out of a staffing shortage. Okay, two if you count Uncle Sugar coming to the rescue and creating cash flow to action solution #1 without impact to shareholders.

I might have liked to see less ads, and maybe one night without the between at-bat music. But otherwise, the nostalgia factor was great and seeing home runs disappear into the cornfield was awesome. The game's ending was as good as could be. Tim Anderson will have that walk-off to remember for the rest of his life. Very cool.

Cheap food, placates bratty children, easily accessible in multiple locations (there's one on both sides of Exit 78 on I-24 in Murfreesboro) so you don't have to make too much of an effort. Or to put it another way...

Even before COVID, I saw less and less people inside fast food joints. The drive thru line could be wrapped around the building, but they weren't going in.

This. Plus municipalities and states with balanced budget rules can't afford to cut off tax revenue again. I'm fine with keeping things open, and think businesses should get to decide if masks are required for entry. We're going to have to shift to an active management phase in all this, might as well do so now.

Yes, but we've got reasons that are COVID explainable, not signs of the economy being in a bad place absent that factor. We can't just go through what we did from March 2020 -Present and not have lingering effects for a bit. Meat processing still isn't back to where it was before the pandemic started, and neither is the supply chain from slaughterhouse to supermarket. Not ideal, but this wasn't going to be fixed when the masks came off. Fuel is one that's always in flux, but OPEC cut production when COVID curbed the use of planes and cars, and they've kept that production low as travel return to try and recoup profits. At best, they're going to slow roll the production increases people are asking for. Cartel's are gonna cartel, unfortunately. Building materials are probably the one to keep an eye out for (to me, anyway), but it ties into a bigger danger. COVID has hedge funds realizing they need even more diversification in the event of bad times. So, they're buying real estate and have no issues creating a permanent renter class along the way. If those don't come down before too long, private capital is going to keep buying homes at a pace I think isn't healthy for society in general. They've taken to overpaying up front knowing they can amortize and deprecate any costs along the way as they generate cash flow from day 1 in what I hope is not a new front for the sake of the middle class. All that leads to building prices increasing along the way. I'm not saying we're in a particularly good spot, just not seeing a bad one yet if bumps smooth out over the next year.