We just walked out and quit the study today. Stanford medical dropped all masking requirements and the researchers running the long-Covid paxlovid study have stopped masking while tending to long covid participants. It’s frankly abhorrent, selfish behavior, and not only does it demonstrate a complete lack of regard and understanding for the illness in question, in my opinion it calls into question the legitimacy of the entire study. We’ve been traveling hundreds of miles for months in order to try to participate in their study and provide THEM with data about the illness, and this is what they think of us. Just want to make everyone aware in case you also have the misfortune of being a participant.
EDIT: Aside from the obvious lack of regard for the safety and well being of their patients/subjects, I should point out that this is also just a terrible choice for the study. Want to know how to get consistent study results? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve dramatically changing the study conditions 3/4 of the way through. Not only are they callously risking people's health, they risk invalidating the entire project and its data by suddenly increasing the odds of reinfecting their participants and negatively changing the course of their health.
Some of the other nurses I work with keep getting excited about dropping continuous mask mandates. Because then they can care for patients without masks 🙄. I work in an oncology setting, the patients are all neutropenic. I don't know wtf is wrong with some healthcare workers - the only place that took masking seriously was at the pulmonology unit where 90% of patients had covid.
I don't remember when I learned how awful the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic actually was. It probably was 1990/1991. I watched the movie Awakenings and it has a connection to the pandemic. I must have asked my mom about it. She was a doctor and she used to be my google.
But it wasn't until 2020 and the start of the pandemic that I learned how insane things were. Those infographic charts were shocking. I'm talking about the ones showing US cities with masking and cities without. At the time I thought "That's batshit but at least this time masking will be the norm." How wrong I was. And just yesterday I scanned a NYT article that "questioned" the efficacy of masks.
The US is going through an insane era and it's weird because such craziness nearly always happens when a country's economy is in chaos. In that situation - I can empathize because chaos can be frightening and disconcerting. But what excuse do Americans have? It's like 10,000,000s of Americans have decided that thinking itself is too hard so they'll just follow along with the majority. Everybody doesn't mask because everybody else doesn't mask. And why would they? The media, politicians, etc are all "over" covid.
such craziness nearly always happens when a country’s economy is in chaos. In that situation - I can empathize because chaos can be frightening and disconcerting. But what excuse do Americans have?
Yeah, it’s not like the American economy is in chaos or anything :hasan-ok-dude:
Bro we can’t afford housing or food
Masks should’ve already been required in most health care settings! Wtf is wrong with these people
Well, it wasn't a requirement prior to covid and they're all pissed off that they've had to for 3 years. It just makes sense from an infection prevention and control mindset, it's like when they crucified that guy for suggesting doctors maybe should wash their hands after handling putrid corpses and delivering a baby...
Watch fascists turn this around as "treat addiction to masks." You know they're gunna' do it.
where are you that they haven't been doing this for 2 years already?
Eternally 2021 forever. I'm trapped here until something changes in society.
What in damnation is wrong with these so-called scientists? Mao was right. All intellectuals need to be sent to their respective "countrysides". Doctors show disdain for their patients, researchers show disdain for their subjects, television show producers are out of touch with the equipment people own, city planners and architects often have no idea what residents what. Insanity. It's all insanity! :marx-joker:
Doctors show disdain for their patients
They really do, and it fucking blows. Especially if you have a history of addiction that you've unfortunately let slip into their records. Doctors were jerks to me before that, but for the most part it was tolerable. But afterwards? It was like a switch flipped. I'm many years clean and I still get the cop treatment from doctors when they see opioid use disorder on my chart. They instantly stop taking anything I say seriously and instead they start scrutinizing everything, searching for the non-existent scam I'm running on them.
They tell you to chart everything, but I've definitely withheld shit when patients disclose stuff to me like I'm not charting sex work history because that gets you put into the "DrUg SeEKinG BeHavIor RiSk" bucket apparently to doctors. Which is annoying because it could have real implications for future care if they treated people like they were people.
Thank you for your service.
Which is annoying because it could have real implications for future care if they treated people like they were people.
Right, it definitely gets people killed. It must happen all the time that someone with a history of addiction comes in with some legitimate pain stemming from an extremely dangerous medical condition. But instead of doing their jobs and finding out what is causing it, all too often the doctor chooses instead to give them a stern lecture and send them home with some tylenols. Pat on the back, hurray, we stopped a junkie from getting their next fix.
The medical system and the war on drugs it is subservient to is making the implicit choice that stopping someone from getting high is much more highly prioritized than making sure someone's cancer, or appendicitis, or kidney stones, etc is caught early. Or even caught at all, because experiences like these make people even more unwilling to see a doctor, as if the medical debt wasn't bad enough.
It’s fucking infuriating. I had a doctor i wasn’t even seeing long term end my Xanax prescription because he thought I was an alcoholic.
1, I’m not an alcoholic, and wasn’t in the hospital for anything related to alcohol, I was in for depression and suicidal thoughts. They put me in the substance abuse unit because the psych unit was full.
2, Alcohol and Xanax are not the same thing! Having an alcohol abuse problem doesn’t make me suddenly likely to abuse Xanax that I haven’t been abusing for the last few years because I don’t like the feeling of Xanax
Here we have a program where your (already subsidised) education is free if you're in medicine or teaching and you agree to work in a rural area for 5 years.
Guess who prefers to pay $30,000?
The researchers care about keeping their research funding. And since this is apparently getting reported to Pfizer, they'll start to care soon:
[...] And Pfizer also has to be involved (probably overseeing it as an investigator sponsored study). Pfizer is required to collect AEs for studies of their products. If it can't be reported directly to Pfizer (not sure I would trust Stanford to do so, though this is required), it can be reported to MedWatch (FAERS). Source: I've had to oversee investigator sponsored trials being done by various hospitals for a pharma co., and collect their AE reports.
Actual idiocy
ignore anything about human welfare for a second:
"We're studying how rats get sick from a particular pathogen"
"oh cool. let's breathe all over them"just another reason why the title of "doctor" or "scientist" or other expert is completely meaningless
jfc my local clinic nurse will wear a mask if I'm so much as getting botox and that was before fucking Covid. It's not hard, and you have to do it a lot anyway. Who are these losers?
I'm in Kentucky and hospitals I go to still require masks for everyone. Wtf Stanford??
:doomjak: At one point I actually thought masking would be common for the foreseeable future.
Me too.
But...
Tired: Covid is preventative and it's deadly. Also it's a poorly understood vascular disease that causes neurological dysfunction.
Wired: You do you!
Science under capitalism becomes more of a joke every day. :joker-amerikkklap:
