Oct 27 2009
My friend is dying of swine flu, Obama ties Bush for golf outings
Not really related at all but enough of a coincidence to make me angry. My friend, we’ll call her Amanda, has been in the hospital since last Friday. She has yet to receive H1N1 medication and her boyfriend informed me that her situation is turning worse and worse.
. . .
“Now watch this drive” — former President George W. Bush.
Hard to forget that Bush quote. Always looking to outdo his predecessor, President Barack Obama was able to accomplish in under ten months what took Bush over 34 months to do — play 24 rounds of golf.
Of course I suppose we should be happy, because by playing with his chief domestic policy adviser, Melody Barnes, Obama became the first U.S. president to play a foursome round of golf with a woman.
Still, as my friend Amanda sits in the hospital, using all of her strength to hold on until the doctors finally give her medication, I have a hard time feeling proud of our president even though he broke such an important gender-equality barrier.
Kind of seems like the same shit on a different day to me.
Sources:
http://online.worldmag.com/2009/10/26/obama-ties-bush-in-golf/
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_WOMAN_IN_FOURSOME?SITE=NCAGW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
http://www.freakingnews.com/Freak-Show-Pictures–2327-4.asp
I don’t get the connection. If he wasn’t playing golf, how would that affect flu “medicine”? It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to your friend’s predicament, but development of flu vaccines went slower than anyone predicted, even though it was begun months ago.
Does giving the vaccine to someone already ill with the swine flu help? Or is your friend waiting on tamiflu? I wish her well, but it’s a scary thing.
However, blaming someone won’t change things.
There isn’t a connection, I did point out that there was no relation and it was just a coincidence in the first sentence of the post.
I posted this right after I found out about her getting worse… I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t my most well thought out post…
Same shit different day, no connection, no deposit, no return, no relation, just coincidence, I didn’t do it, in actuality, it was the one armed man wearing the blue pantsuit with the red shoes and a feather in his hat he calls macaroni. Doctors, well they are all whores anyhow…if they weren’t and were so noble for the cause of mankind, they’d do it for free all the time in Africa where they don’t have the good sense to give a shit about anyone!
My heart goes out for your friend and her sickness…tell her don’t let the damn bastards get her down and tell the doc to QFTD!!! Don’t let no H1N1 ruin it!!
If it were me, I’d sneak her in some ice cream…creamsicle, that’s what I always needed when I was sick as a kid.
Hey Northsong, glad to see you’re back. My friend is doing a little bit better and apparently has gotten her medication now :)
Its a sad fact that the alphabet-media is finally reporting and asking questions like “Why is there a shortage of H1N1 vaccines?” HHS Secretary Kathleen Seblius promised 200 million doses of the vaccine by the end of the years. So far, they have only produced around 30 million vaccines.
Maybe if she spent more time finding out why the delay and less time telling people to sneeze in their elbow area, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
My two nephews had the swine flu and it wasn’t too bad. Its all hype and a “crisis” to divert attention away from more important issue.
I didn’t mean to make light of your friend’s illness if that’s what came through. I take swine flu very seriously.
The vaccine shortage, however, is not a bureaucracy thing, though. In this case, the CDC (and, in fact, agencies around the world) took unprecedented steps with the intent of ensuring they had enough swine flu. For the CDC, that meant having five different contractors working on it. Unfortunately, what no one expected was that virus would grow at 1/4 the expected rate. It also took months to develop the test to detect the level of virus on the eggs so that they didn’t realize it was growing so much slower than it normally does until only a month or two ago.
The worst thing the CDC did was provide the “best case” numbers, but it’s hard to fault them since, as a government agency, they have to be open about everything. You tell a report a range of values (including best case) and the reporters are going to be reporting the extremes only. Unfortunately, no one foresaw the lower growth rate or the fact that, since it’s inherent in the virus, that it would affect all the contractors (actually, all but one - for some reason the nasal spray vaccine does not have this problem). Common cause failures can be the hardest to predict.
I’m glad your friend is improving.
Thank you everyone for your thoughts…
She’s actually out of the hospital and doing much better. For a while though (when I wrote this post) she didn’t want anyone to see her, she was sleeping upwards of 18 hours a day and for a week she couldn’t keep any food or liquid in her stomach…