It was more a matter of how misinformation malignantly spreads I believe.
I had to see the only available PCP to see anyone else. This automatically prompted medical releases that, even if unethical, would have still made everything technically legal. If it was an emergency room trip, there were always the same two or three physicians there, so they all became aware of me from the first couple of episodes and could warn any specialist they referred me to see.
Same deal with laboratories and radiological facilities. When you've got only one or two options in town, they have your consent to release PHI by default if you ever want the results interpreted, and their interpreting physician can just accompany the report with a courtesy call to the receiving provider about a suspected diagnosis.
Fellow hypochondriac here. I was at the point where doctors, hospital staff, and lab techs would immediately warn new practitioners about me so they wouldn't waste finite medical resources in a small town, and I just completely discontinued normal activities out of terror as a result.
When I finally blacked out and fractured my spine, first responders detected a lifelong cardiac arrhythmia in the back of an ambulance. Only with that knowledge have I been able to receive treatment and begin to heal emotionally from the gaslighting and medical abuse I experienced while in the care of licensed professionals.
AI-assisted medicine will prevent so many of these mistakes in the future. It can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned.
This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure out how to stop it from happening again. This has nothing to do with the PRC or anyone or anywhere else, it could have happened at any biological facility in the world and will eventually happen again somewhere unless scientific honesty and cooler heads prevail.
The remorseless prosecutorial effort that led to his suicide should be talked about far more than it is. He was a very unfortunate loss for a generation, but was also one of many who fall victim to career prosecutors that play with peoples lives.
You can put more than one drug in a single shot. The MMR vaccine contains Mumpsvax, Attenuvax, and Meruvax to fight the mumps, measles, and rubella, respectively
On one hand it feels completely appropriate and even deserved. On the other, yes, this is unfortunately a path to a very serious totalitarian issue. Situations like this one underscore the future importance of cryptocurrencies.
Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
First, I'll say that I've contracted for a state's caucus at the capitol building in addition to at the homes of minor politicians. That's my frame of reference.
The real answer? It's nowhere near as bad in my opinion as the other implications of an insurrection. These systems are already poorly secured and also physically accessible by a number of other staff, so one more potential compromise is not changing much.
The numbers start going down quickly once infections have been so prolific that crowd immunity is present.
I live in Texas, but I'm sure I personally infected no fewer than 10,000-20,000 people last March, including the sorority that purportedly brought it back from Mexico during spring break. No doctor wanted to listen and no hospitals would test me even after I begged some of the best providers in the region. It wasn't until almost 9 months later that the mistake was acknowledged, and it's highly likely that community spread existed even in the US in November 2019 or even October 2019 just based on retrospective serology studies.
Places with poor hygiene controls like India have likely had far, far more infections than anyone even can imagine. That might be one of the first places to be immune.
There are multiple points of failure. Pretending everything was A-OK is the largest one, failing to identify the virus's presence in the country for months was another, denying and downplaying the usefulness of masks was another, underfunding hospitals was another, failing to secure PPE was another, making it painfully difficult to get tested was another. There's a lot of blame to go around on this one. But reopening the economy was the biggest mistake.
LA is one of the most connected cities in the world. It's not LA's fault necessarily, but the country as a whole should've been on complete lockdown from April until whenever the situation was under control. Our national wealth and GDP have plenty of room for a complete quarantine, even if that means paying everyone's paychecks for a year or longer. We deliberately chose to allow 350,000+ peoples lives to end instead.
What are they supposed to do? Sometimes dealing with reality involves some pretty uncomfortable choices to make, even when that essentially makes you the bad guy.
The real issue here is that the economy was prematurely reopened before it was safe -- we have far more than enough money as a nation to have prevented this scenario from happening and chose a path of destruction out of sheer avarice instead.
Even as an American with no stake in the UK, this departure saddens me after how hard my family fought in Europe in defense of stability in that region.
The best thing that can come of this is that the UK promptly rejoins and everyone tries to put this indiscretion in the past. But even assuming they do rejoin, this tantrum has still significantly increased the risk of a massive conflict for probably a century or longer -- any hell-bent ideological maniac in any member state can now effectively use Brexit as a populist rallying cry that might actually work. (And most certainly, states with minority viewpoints will use it as leverage against the majority for an untold length of time.)
There's some real potential for abuse so I'd probably have to oppose this one, but I think when you're dealing with people willfully spreading a deadly disease, that's probably already actionable under current laws in most if not all states.
On face value, deliberately endangering others for no reason is a pretty clear sign that someone might qualify for court-ordered psychiatric evaluation and temporary institutionalization, especially since it's already a criminal offense to expose someone to infectious conditions like HIV without their knowledge.
If the data is sensitive, keeping it on a locked down iPad is nowhere near enough to protect it. I can understand if they're using the images for machine learning or something, but if it's truly just to prevent future malpractice, data like this should only be kept on air-gapped systems or offline media.
That said, let's hope we're beyond the point of anyone caring about pictures of the human body or whether someone's had plastic surgery.
If I were threatened with something like this, which could be pretty embarrassing since I lost so much weight and have loose skin, I'd tell the hackers that I'll release even more if they leak mine and then attempt to find dirt on them.
I had to see the only available PCP to see anyone else. This automatically prompted medical releases that, even if unethical, would have still made everything technically legal. If it was an emergency room trip, there were always the same two or three physicians there, so they all became aware of me from the first couple of episodes and could warn any specialist they referred me to see.
Same deal with laboratories and radiological facilities. When you've got only one or two options in town, they have your consent to release PHI by default if you ever want the results interpreted, and their interpreting physician can just accompany the report with a courtesy call to the receiving provider about a suspected diagnosis.