Leonard Zwelling

Dr. Aaron E. Carroll is the chief health officer for Indiana University. IU is one of 500 colleges and universities that have mandated covid vaccination. Houston Methodist Hospital has done the same and fired those who would not get vaccinated without a medical or religious reason to be exempt. As Dr. Carroll points out in his opinion piece in The New York Times on June 29, more mandates are coming and they ought to.

I’ve known my best friend for almost fifty years now. I married her 49 years ago this August. I have friends from medical school who have known me longer. One is on staff at MD Anderson and one is my cardiologist at St. Luke’s. I have a friend from college who lives in Colorado who has known me longer than my wife, but other than family, no one has known me longer than my high school friends. One friendship goes back over sixty years to the mid-1950s. I was the best man at both of their weddings and they were in my wedding party as well.

Things need constant care. I learned that the hard way as an administrator. I was constantly touching base with my managers as to how projects were progressing, what problems they were encountering, and how the morale of our personnel was at any given moment. What were the managers’ needs in time and resources? That was my immediate concern every day, all day. Then it was fulfilling the needs of the faculty. Were we doing our job of service with a sense of urgency? That was my question to myself every day.

Allysia Finley opines in The Wall Street Journal on June 24 that the FDA was correct in its overriding of its Advisory Board’s recommendation to reject the application of Biogen’s drug aducanumab. The agency approved it for treatment of early Alzheimer’s disease. The drug is reputed to reduce amyloid plaque in the brain and reduce cognitive decline. As Ms. Finlay points out, the clinical trials were not perfect in their conclusions but there was some signal of benefit at high drug doses.

Iran is getting a new president. Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative hardliner hand picked by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will ascend to the presidency in six weeks as Hassan Rouhani, a more moderate leader, steps aside having had to withstand the onslaught that was Donald Trump’s treatment of Iran. Trump ripped up the 2015 Obama nuclear deal and squeezed the life out of the Iranian economy with sanctions he thought would get the Iranians to the negotiating table and force them into a better deal. It didn’t work.

It looks like the United States will fall short of President Biden’s goal of having 70% of Americans vaccinated against covid with at least one shot by July 4. Why?

The easiest explanation would be a lack of available vaccine. This is simply not the case. There are millions of doses unused as of now and there were whole parking lots devoted to rapid inoculation that remain empty. Despite this, about 177 million Americans have received at least one shot yet many states, especially in the South, have vaccination rates around 30%. That’s a disaster for the country and for those unvaccinated Americans.

If supply is not the problem for the low rates of vaccination then demand must be. It is.

I must be getting old. Wait! That’s not true. I am old. It has been weighing on me.

But what is so disappointing is that I am so out of touch as well. I really don’t understand culture any more.

BATNA: Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement.

What’s BATNA? It’s the point in a negotiation when one party to the talks determines that doing nothing is a better choice than any likely agreement.

Obviously, from President Biden’s behavior on June 16, he has not reached his BATNA with Putin, even if Putin has reached his with America.

The surest way of guaranteeing that we have not seen the last of Donald Trump on the national political scene is to have a failed Biden Presidency. Mitch McConnell thinks so and so does Kevin McCarthy. They are doing everything in their power to just say no to everything proposed by the White House.

William A. Galston makes a stunning series of observations in The Wall Street Journal on June 9. In a piece called “What Drives GOP Resistance to Vaccines?” he notes that the typical demographic of a Republican voter ought to predict that that voter would be vaccinated. It does not.