Covid 2022: A new year, new fears

By now, Dr. Fauci’s Covid “fearspeak” has become background noise. Yes, the new “Omicron” variant is making its way around the world. Fortunately, reports from South Africa as well as other studies indicate that Omicron’s illness is milder than Delta. Even Fauci-friendly public health physicians have cautioned that there is “absolutely no reason to panic.” 

In 2022, we should panic because opioid overdoses took the lives of 100,000 fellow Americans from April 2020 to April 2021—an increase of 28 percent from the same period the year before. The statistic is appalling but not surprising given the Covid lockdowns coupled with millions of doses of fentanyl and other illicit drugs flooding across a porous border.

We should panic because one in ten Americans has diabetes and one in three Americans has prediabetes. Moreover, 89 percent of the diabetics are overweight (Body Mass Index over 25). Just over 73 percent of the U.S. population are overweight and 42.5 percent are obese (BMI over 30). Worse yet, obesity among adults, age 18 to 25 years increased from 6.2 percent to 32.7 percent over the last 40 years Instead of Dr. Fauci telling us we have to relinquish our individual choices when it comes to the increasingly ineffective current Covid vaccines, he should emphasize the effect of obesity on Covid outcomes. According to the CDC, about 78 percent of people who have been hospitalized needed a ventilator or died from Covid-19 have been overweight or obese. 

We should fear the loss scientific medical practice, when to avoid being stressed out, patients are demanding informed consent to be weighed in the doctor’s office. Yet curiously, informed consent is not required for experimental mRNA vaccines.

We should fear the blatant abuse of power by our public servants in the name of public health. We should be afraid when our top health bureaucrat, the Health and Human Services Secretary declared “it is absolutely the government’s business to know people’s vaccination status.” We should panic when elected representatives jump on the medical privacy-be-damned bandwagon. The House of Representatives handily approved the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act of 2021 which would establish yet another government database. This one is an “immunization information system,” that can share every vaccine dose with not only with other governmental but private entities.

We should be afraid when the FDA sends threatening letters to pharmacists, trying to limit the use of a safe drug shown to be 60 percent effective in improving outcomes of Covid. Why? It has side effects such as skin rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, facial or limb swelling, neurologic adverse events (dizziness, seizures, confusion), sudden drop in blood pressure, severe skin rash potentially requiring hospitalization and liver injury. We’ve seen no such letters regarding molnupiravir, the new kid on the block for Covid treatment that can cause diarrhea, dizziness, headache, hives, itching, skin rash, nausea, redness of skin, vomiting, bone and cartilage damage in children, birth defects, cancer and is only 30 percent effective.

We should panic knowing that pharmaceutical companies spent $266,846,347 lobbying Congress, and the American Medical Association’s top corporate donors are pharmaceutical companies. 

We should panic about the federal government establishing guidelines (future regulations?) for news and social media on suppression of health “misinformation.” We should worry that Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook engages in Soviet-style silencing certain political viewpoints

We should fear misguided attempts to stop racism with racism. In the name of social justice, colleges, businesses, medical schools, and K-12 schools have fallen into the trap of promoting Marxist race warfare where students and employees can learn that minorities are permanent victims of the irredeemably racist white people.

We should fear becoming accustomed to a new socially acceptable apartheid: segregation by race, vaccination status, and mask-wearing.

Most of all, we should fear how readily our fellow Americans acquiesced to unreasonable, unscientific demands at the altar of Covid-19.

When it comes to Covid in 2022, opt for prudence, not panic. Eat well, get enough vitamin D, exercise, wash your hands, engage with your friends, cough or sneeze in your elbow, and stay home if you are feeling unwell. If you do get sick, seek medical care immediately.

Live your life After all, there are 14 more letters after omicron in the Greek alphabet.

Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School. She attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law. She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. Website: marilynsingletonmdjd.com; Twitter: @MSingletonMDJD.54January