It’s been a boring old week or three here in Britain. I mean, it’s true that the government wants to fix the doctor shortage by shortening the time they spend studying medicine, but other than that we’re all just sitting here watching daytime TV and waiting for something to happen. 

Okay, we’re not supposed to call it TV. It’s the telly, but I’ve never been good at following the social cues, and whatever you call the thing, once you leave the safe harbor of the BBC it’s full of ads for incontinence underwear and chairs that can lift you to the heavens without any effort on your part.

But forget the ads. Forget daytime TV. I haven’t really been watchingit, even if everyone else has, so I’m only guessing at what they’re selling. What I want to talk about is medicine. It’s been in the news and if all goes according to the government’s plan, medical students will study for four years instead of five, but don’t worry, it’s all perfectly safe. The change will be accompanied by a simplification of the human body to make diagnosis less confounding and repair more efficient. 

Why does that seem like a good idea to anybody? Because we’re short some 9,000 doctors, although (as the Japanese paper I’m linking to says, that’s surely an underestimate.

It also mentions an overall shortage of 124,000 people in health care.

Why do I have to go to Japan for data on the UK? Because that’s where I found it first and it’s not 8 am yet, so what the hell. 

The government’s also proposing a medical apprenticeship program to shovel new doctors into the system. Details seem to be scarce, although letting me know what’s going on isn’t anyone’s top priority, so maybe the details are out there but haven’t filtered down to my level yet. Either way, I’d love it someone would reassure me that they won’t be taking kids at sixteen, introducing them to the aorta and the colon, explaining why they shouldn’t mix them up, and then letting them practice stitching people back together.

The British Medical Association’s first reaction was–and I’m paraphrasing heavily–”Excuse me, but we’re a little short-handed just now. Who do you think is going to train these people?”

Its second reaction was to head for the pub in search of solace.

The government plans to deal with the shortage of nurses in pretty much the same way. Apprenticeships. The word has such a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-down-to-work sound. How could it possibly go wrong?

The government doesn’t plan to increase anyone’s pay so it keeps up with inflation or figure out why–it’s mysterious, I tell you–people have been leaving the medical professions in droves. It doesn’t plan to pour enough money into the National Health Service to make up for what it’s taken out. Because where’s the fun in that?

 

Elite overproduction

The plan to magic up extra doctors and nurses is–bear with me and the connection may make sense–related to a theory I read about recently: elite overproduction. This comes to us from Peter Turchin and his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which I’ll confess to not having read yet. What I did read was a longish and thought-provoking review. I’m linking to it. It’s worth your time.

Okay, it’s your time. What do I know about how it’s best spent? But the review’s from a British newspaper even if Turchin isn’t, so I’m still including a bit more Britain-based news here. Almost.

What Turhin argues is that rich families and elite universities are churning out more wealthy graduates than society has a use for. That means people who were expecting to be senators or MPs or CEOs get shoved aside in favor of–well, it’s hard enough if they get shoved aside by someone from a more or less identical background, but if it’s by some outsider that really stings. So since they couldn’t merge into the elite–since someone else stole the place that was rightfully theirs (and if you doubt it was, just ask them)–they become counter-elites: they channel the discontent of people who don’t have their wealth or connections and who have much better reasons to be pissed off, at least in my all-important opinion. Think Donald Trump. Think (if you’re in Britain) Nigel Farage. Think Boris Johnson. Think all the shouting by people who look to us like members of the elite about what’s wrong with the elite.

Is the surplus elite to blame for the National Health Service being so battered? Not entirely. The process started some time ago, by a section of the elite that swore taking money out of government services would make them more efficient, as would outsourcing government responsibilities to private companies. 

I seem to remember them saying, “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it.” Which may be true, but they’ve shown us that you can absolutely make a problem worse by taking money away from it. 

After they outsourced and took money out, though, the counter-elite came along to tell us Britain’s problems–exacerbated, remember, by taking money out, etc.–could be solved by leaving the European Union, which was keeping money from going to the NHS. So we left, and oddly enough money didn’t flow into the NHS. It not only didn’t get better, it got worse.

So they changed tunres. It was because of the immigrants coming here and using our services. What we needed to do was get rid of the immigrants, and we could if only the tree-hugging, immigrant-loving, avocado-eating courts and lawyers would get out of the way.

Meanwhile, funding’s fallen further and further behind inflation.

Sorry, I’m not managing to be funny about this, am I? 

The point is that raging against a combination of the most vulnerable and the elite gets people elected. Three rasberries for the counter-elite. On the evidence I’ve seen so far, they’re anything but competent. On the other hand, they’ll always find someone to blame. They’re very good at that.

 

Enough of that. How about a bit of Covid news?

Let’s not get too excited about this, because it hasn’t gone into clinical studies yet, but a drug called NACE2i shows promise as both a Covid preventive and a long-Covid cure. It keeps the virus from replicating and protects against reinfection. 

Professor Sudha Rao talks about it as boosting “the effectiveness of existing vaccines, providing long-lasting protection against any variant of the virus that tries to enter the cells.”

And long Covid? 

“We uncovered the pathway that the virus uses to induce the persistent inflammation which causes organ damage found in long COVID. This study shows our drug prevents that inflammation and even repairs damaged lung tissue in pre-clinical models. It is both a prevention and a treatment.”

How does it do that? According to the article I stole this from, it reprograms “the hijacked ACE2 receptor, which disarms the virus and stops it replicating. The reprogrammed ACE2 receptor is returned to the cell surface where it acts as a lock that prevents the virus from entering the cell. This process also reverses the inflammation COVID-19 causes in the lungs.”

But again, it hasn’t gone into clinical trials yet. We’ll see what happens.

 

Of airlines and pastries

Ryanair has managed to offend the government of the Balearic Islands. Two passengers got on board with an ensaimada each–a local, spiral-shaped pastry that tourists load up on as gifts for family members and cat sitters. 

Ryanair charged the passengers £45 each for going over the hand luggage limit. The passengers replied with some version of “are you kidding me?” and gave up their ensaimadas. Somehow or other the fuss went public and escalated into a flap about what’s hand luggage and what isn’t.

That led to Ryanair meeting with a collection of important people and announcing that it never had charged anyone for carrying pastries on board. Never. Not once. It hadn’t even dreamed about it. The people had hand luggage. You know: suitcase-y things. They were charged for those.

Whatever. Passengers can now officially bring up to two ensainadas on board without paying extra and the world is a safer place to live in.

 

Living in interesting times

You know that recent US Supreme Court ruling that makes it legal for businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ clients? Well, the request for service that the case (sort of) rests on may never have happened.

The denial of service started–or so the story goes–when a gay man asked a website designer to design invites and possibly a website for a gay wedding. The designer refused, citing her religious beliefs. 

What wedding needs a website? Beats me, but then there’s no amount of money that can’t be spent on a wedding, and LGBTetc, people can be just as silly about this as straight people. So paying someone to set up a website? Sure, why not? 

The interesting thing is that the man who requested this–his first name is Stewart and he doesn’t want his last name loose in public–never contacted the designer, although she listed his name, email address, and phone number. He’s not only straight, he’s already married. He doesn’t need wedding invites, never mind a website.

Does that invalidate the ruling? ‘Fraid not, but it does make the claim that Christians are under siege by hordes of gay people clamoring for wedding cakes and napkins look a bit silly.