On the Hope Front: A Pfizer at-home pill has been authorized to treat Covid patients. It is shown to be nearly 90% effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths in patients at high risk of severe illness and recent lab data suggests the drug retains its effectiveness against Omicron. It is expected within weeks that scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research will announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide.
On the Incompetence Front: The need to seriously ramp up free testing has been a glaring shortcoming since 2020. If Biden thinks that the major point of his address to deliver test kits sometime in January is fooling anybody about either the administration's abominable lack of preparedness or its ability to adapt to meet the Omicron challenge, there is little doubt the polls now and the votes later on will say otherwise. On the testing front, there certainly are countries doing a worse job than we are doing. But no one believes the United States is anywhere close to what many other countries have achieved or what we should have achieved on the testing front. On the vaccination front, the CDC and FDA are eerily silent as to their view of Israel's decision to administer a fourth shot (a second booster) to front-line medical personnel, people over 60, and those with underlying conditions. And on the treatment front, well, don't get me started. No one in their right mind wants Trump back. But it is depressing in the extreme that replacing Trump with the promise of competence has been so unfulfilled. Still, if we can just survive this latest surge, science just might bail us out. I pray it does.
On the Prayer Front: Speaking of prayer, while there is no shortage of warnings when it comes to gyms, restaurants, bars, entertainment fora, airplanes, places of employment, and other venues, the media seems to give a pass when it comes to churches. Hence, we give kudos to this WSJ article for insightfully addressing the "[t]he question of whether and how to hold services [that] has exposed a theological divide among churches throughout the pandemic: More conservative congregations often stressed the biblical imperative to gather and worship in person, while more liberal ones often focused on the importance of not doing harm to their communities and members by spreading the virus." This NYT article also addresses the issues. Finally, the Archbishop of Canterbury has come down squarely as follows: "Jesus would get a vaccine, Archbishop of Canterbury suggests as he says getting the jab is 'not about me and my rights to choose – it's about how I love my neighbour.'"
[EOP]
