Celebrity Healthcare

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

The US Food and Drug Administration could rule as early as today to approve Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for distribution in the United States, and if that happens people could start receiving inoculations for the dreaded disease within a very few days.  Supposedly there is a distribution scheme that will insure that the first round of vaccinations go to emergency healthcare workers and people in nursing homes, and the next round will go to the elderly who are not yet in nursing homes.  From there it will head on down to younger and healthier individuals.  

Right now the plan is for all inoculations to be voluntary, with people having the right to refuse the shots if they so desire.  Current estimates are that approximately half of the country is ready to roll up their sleeves and submit to the needle.  Former Presidents Obama, Clinton and Bush have all said that they will take the shots publicly in order to serve as role models encouraging all Americans to get vaccinated.

The new COVID-19 vaccines being developed by several pharmaceutical companies are preventative measures, not cures.    Their purpose is to keep people who are exposed to the coronavirus from getting the disease.  People who have already contracted the disease are not looking for a prevention strategy, they are after something entirely different.  Their goal is to receive a medicine that will cure the malady.

There are some curative measures on th market, treatments which seem to enhance the survival rates of those who are infected with COVID-19.  Unfortunately, the best "cures" are expensive and in short supply.  From a medical ethics perspective, those medicines should be available to the general public on an equitable basis.  Any one person should have as good of a chance of receiving a miracle medicine as any other person.  An individual's wealth, class, race, or political status should have nothing to do with whether they get the best treatment available or not.

But, of course, this is America and things do not always follow an ethical curve.

There is a rare treatment available to fight COVID-19 called a "monoclonal antibody cocktail" that was developed by Eli Lilly and Regeneron that is one of the few treatments proven to be highly effective in battling the disease.  Not surprisingly, it is the treatment that Donald Trump received while he was an in-patient with COVID-19 at Walter Reed Hospital this past October.  It is a drug cocktail so rare, expensive, and in such short supply, that hospitals who receive doses of the treatment routinely distribute them by lottery.

Donald Trump probably did not win a lottery at Walter Reed.  An argument could be made, one must suppose, that a nation's leader should receive the best treatment because the health of the nation is dependent to an extent on the leader's health - at least in theory.

But others not so essential to the nation's health also seem to be winning the treatment lottery.

Rudy Giuliani is a 76-year-old male who also happens to be Donald Trump's personal lawyer.  Monday of this week Giuliani was diagnosed with COVID-19 and admitted to a hospital in New York City even though his symptom's did not warrant hospitalization at that time.  While Giuliani was in the hospital he had a telephone interview with a New York City radio station in which he said "If it wasn't me, I wouldn't have been put in the hospital, frankly.  Sometimes when you're a celebrity, they're worried if something happens to you they're going to examine it more carefully, and do everything right."    According to Rudy, his hospitalization was the result of his celebrity status rather than his medical status.

But that wasn't all.  Apparently Donald Trump intervened on behalf of his personal attorney and got the hospital to give him the same treatment that Trump got at Walter Reed.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Ben Carson, the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and an advisor to Donald Trump, also won the COVID-19 treatment lottery - with an assist from Donald John Trump, of course.

Rudy Giuliani was sent home yesterday feeling  "100% better," and on that same day 3,243 Americans died of COVID-19.   What a shame all of those people didn't have friends in high places, or were "celebrities," or at least had a fair chance of receiving the best treatment available.

And now the vaccinations to prevent COVID-19 are about to roll out, and we can all rest assured that their delivery will be fair and equitable because this is the United States of America and we don't play favorites - unless, of course, some of our betters need to buck the line!