COVID-19 Vaccines for ALL

If poor countries go unvaccinated, a study says, rich ones will pay. That’s a piece originally from the New York Times, and picked up by multiple news outfits internationally. My thoughts: Control the virus first, and the economy will follow. The economy concerned is not confined to one location. Each location or community is dependent […]

Face-to-Face Dance Classes during COVID-19 Pandemic

I co-authored a “how-to” guide for #COVID19 safe practices in the dance studio. Happy to see our journal article published but #vaccine and normalcy can’t come soon enough. Dr. Filomar Tariao and I were classmates in medical school (from the INTARMED program). We both ended up in arts-related careers… him being more in the arts […]

Reports of COVID-19 Vaccine Safety in Norway: Some Titles Could Have Been Written Better

News reports about 29 frail elderly people dying after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination in Norway were an exercise in critical reading. Some of them were especially scary if one saw the news item titles alone, without clicking through to the article and reading the actual accompanying text. Yes. The headlines can look scary and […]

When Algorithms Fail

After approval by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration on December 10, 2020, the Pfizer vaccine made its way to hospitals all over the country. By Monday the 14th, I started seeing colleagues and friends’ social media posts about receiving the vaccine – all very uplifting: excited, ecstatic, emotional about what people called the […]

Racism Issues and COVID-19

I read this article today about pulse oximeters, and I thought of several articles I read previously in September. Pulse oximeters are borne of racist bias in technology. I was today years old when I found out. And it makes sense. They work by sensing the color of blood flowing under the skin, based on […]

The Irony of Being Filipino in a world with COVID-19

Today, I read this article on COVID-19 and how it affects Filipinos in the diaspora, by Filipino-American Susan Araneta (she has a Masters degree in Public Health so she certainly knows what she is talking about). Access full article here: http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/a-virus-among-us-filipinos-and-covid-19 In her introduction, she writes about the first COVID-19 vaccine administered in the United […]