By David Mark Greaves
Simone Biles
What a class act champ Simone Biles is. She made her jump and then went with a thoughtful look to her coaches and then to her teammates. She hugs them all and we hear them say, “I love you. This is your first. I’ll be fine.”
After she said, she realized while in the vault that she didn’t know where in the air she was. Given their livelihoods, it could mean not only losing a medal, but also a life-changing injury. “I just never had the feeling that I was going into a competition like this. When I got out of here I thought, ‘No, mental isn’t there. I have to let the girls do it and focus on myself, ‘”Biles said.
Sometimes boxers in the ring or soccer players stay longer than they should and live with regret.
Biles is a champion who knows when to step down and, as she says, has to handle the fight in her head.
Voter suppression
It’s been over 50 years and civil rights activist Rev Jesse Jackson is still handcuffed for voting. This time it was Monday during a sit-in outside the office of Democratic Senator Krysten Sinema in Phoenix to draw attention to her refusal to change the rules of the filibuster that are preventing the Senate from passing voting laws.
Rev. William Barber and Beto O’Rourke lead a march in the Texas capital, Austin, to protest draconian efforts by the Republican majority to suppress voters, forcing Democratic officials to leave the state in order to enforce a legislative quorum prevent and stop voting.
Without the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act now pending, the threat of white supremacy is real and must be fought if the nation is to be the place we grew up, believe in.
The Centers for Disease Control is changing the mask guidelines. Why?
When asked, “Do you know what you are doing or are we all in an experiment?” The answer is that the CDC is doing the best that they know at the time.
When the novel virus emerged and the pandemic began, doctors, researchers, and drug companies began learning how to respond, and with each study, fewer people died. Doctors learned to lay patients on their stomachs instead of their backs, they learned not to use ventilators at the beginning of treatment. Researchers learned about monoclonal antibodies and airborne transmission, and then masks were prescribed. Pharmaceutical companies learned how to develop a vaccine that produces antibodies that attack the virus.
This vaccination success, 161 million vaccinations and only about 5,914 reported hospital admissions and deaths among the fully vaccinated meant that the mask mandate could be relaxed.
but a serious problem has occurred.
Now they have learned that the new Delta variant is more transmissible and more dangerous than the original and that people who have been vaccinated can still be infected, even if they have no or only minimal symptoms. A report in National Geographic of a July 9 study shows “that people infected with the Delta variant have about a thousand times more virus particles in their airways when they test positive for COVID-19 than people with previous strains of the virus same stage of infection. “
We understand that vaccinated people, even without symptoms and in the company of other vaccinated people, can relax, still infect and transmit the virus and pose a deadly threat to the unvaccinated when they go home.
The CDC has updated its recommendations for wearing masks indoors based on these new findings. These messages are sequential, not mixed. I don’t doubt there will be more changes in the future based on vaccination rates, infections, and the emergence of new, potentially even more dangerous, variants.
It doesn’t have to be like that. “There would be no evolution [of the virus] If everyone were vaccinated, the virus would just go away, ”says Robert Darnell, a medical scientist at Rockefeller University in New York. “The vaccination basically eradicated measles and came close to eradicating polio. We could do the same with COVID here. We could deal with that. “
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