(One hundred posts! Including referrals to previous posts! And it only took a little over eleven years! Woo hoo!)
Reports are coming out that one of the several proposed treatments for COVID-19 will be a "Multistem" stem-cell therapy from Athersys, a company that works with adult stem cells. According to its site,
"We are developing MultiStem®, a patented, adult-derived 'off-the-shelf' stem cell therapy platform, for disease indications in areas of neurological, inflammatory & immune, and cardiovascular disease areas, as well as other critical care indications where there is substantial unmet medical need due to the limitations in standard of care."
Adult stem cells, a topic of many posts (of the one hundred) in the history of Benevolent Grammarian, are derived from actual adults, born children, or umbilical-cord blood. For many years, while embryo-destructive stem-cell research was being hyped by the media, adult stem cells -- which have already been used successfully to treat patients in the fight against 73 different diseases and ailments -- were often given short shrift or ignored outright. As with other potential remedies for COVID-19, we'll keep our eyes on this one...
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Samantha Bee -- SO Heroic for Going after a Man Who's Trying to Save Lives
As with every crisis, we see both the good and the bad in humanity. Recall the words Fred Rogers reportedly said about his mother comforting him by telling him to "look for the helpers." There have been plenty of helpers, worldwide, since COVID-19 was unleashed, greatly abetted by a tyrannical communist government in China that lied about how communicable the disease is, and punished those who tried to publish the truth.
The helpers come in the form of the many health-care workers at high risk of contracting contagion by going to work and staying for overtime every day, grocery clerks who remain stationary while hoping the wrong person doesn't sneeze on them, good folks checking in on their neighbors to make sure they have everything they need, and even those who've just agreed to stay inside and to go for walks alone until this slow-motion catastrophe eventually blows over.
The helpers also come in the form of business and those "evil" corporations, who have changed the structure of their processing plants practically overnight, to make ventilators and hospital beds, or have donated hydroxychloroquine to the front. One of these businesses is MyPillow, chief executive officer, Mike Lindell, has overseen the temporary transformation of production, so that 75% of operations goes to making surgical masks to help health-care workers.
Ah, but Mike Lindell, in addition to being a philanthropist, is [gasp!] a Trump supporter and (EGADS!) an Evangelical Christian, a point that was made more obvious when Lindell took the podium at a recent coronavirus task-force press conference. At one point, Lindell thanked God for Trump's presidency -- and that was enough to earn the snark from Full Frontal's Samantha Bee, who tweeted, "My Pillow is now making highly absorbent pillows so you can cry yourself to sleep after watching this press conference."
Bee did not seem to go into detail at what about the press conference made her want to weep. Sane people would probably weep, if anything, at the outpouring of help from so many people to so many other people. I know that empathy is something that moves me, personally.
Bee, however, would rather tee off on Lindell, because, do-gooding be damned, the man is religious and a supporter of the president, and thus must be destroyed. Bee's the real hero in this, after all. Lindell might be making 50,000 face masks, which can save who-knows-how-many lives, but Bee is Keeping America Sane! Or Speaking Truth to Power! Or Resisting or Persisting or whatever it is she proudly tells herself after a taping. As with most rant comics, her rants are not comic.
The helpers come in the form of the many health-care workers at high risk of contracting contagion by going to work and staying for overtime every day, grocery clerks who remain stationary while hoping the wrong person doesn't sneeze on them, good folks checking in on their neighbors to make sure they have everything they need, and even those who've just agreed to stay inside and to go for walks alone until this slow-motion catastrophe eventually blows over.
The helpers also come in the form of business and those "evil" corporations, who have changed the structure of their processing plants practically overnight, to make ventilators and hospital beds, or have donated hydroxychloroquine to the front. One of these businesses is MyPillow, chief executive officer, Mike Lindell, has overseen the temporary transformation of production, so that 75% of operations goes to making surgical masks to help health-care workers.
Ah, but Mike Lindell, in addition to being a philanthropist, is [gasp!] a Trump supporter and (EGADS!) an Evangelical Christian, a point that was made more obvious when Lindell took the podium at a recent coronavirus task-force press conference. At one point, Lindell thanked God for Trump's presidency -- and that was enough to earn the snark from Full Frontal's Samantha Bee, who tweeted, "My Pillow is now making highly absorbent pillows so you can cry yourself to sleep after watching this press conference."
Bee did not seem to go into detail at what about the press conference made her want to weep. Sane people would probably weep, if anything, at the outpouring of help from so many people to so many other people. I know that empathy is something that moves me, personally.
Bee, however, would rather tee off on Lindell, because, do-gooding be damned, the man is religious and a supporter of the president, and thus must be destroyed. Bee's the real hero in this, after all. Lindell might be making 50,000 face masks, which can save who-knows-how-many lives, but Bee is Keeping America Sane! Or Speaking Truth to Power! Or Resisting or Persisting or whatever it is she proudly tells herself after a taping. As with most rant comics, her rants are not comic.
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