Monday, October 18, 2021

Sad news today!! Colin Powell passed away due to complications of COVID-19. He was vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2. He died at Walter Reed Hospital. I got to know him through social events. He was always very kind, generous and gave me advice about writing my memoir. Very likeable person. I received a call this morning from Dr. Jason Blaylock of Walter Reed hospital. I got to know Jason from when he came over to the office and gave me an Army medallion for giving a lecture to Walter Reed. In addition, he was involved in the care of President Trump when he got COVID. He wanted to speak to me to run by me exactly what he did in the treatment of to determine if I would have done anything different and if he had made any mistakes in the treatment. It was a very humble reaching out to me by a very sincere physician who cared deeply about whether he gave optimal care to I went over with him each and every step in detail from the time entered the hospital to the time he died this morning. At every single point in his care I had no problems or issues with the way he was treated or handled. I would not have done anything differently and I believe that received as good care as he could have gotten anywhere in the country or the world. It was merely an example of an 83 year old man with an underlying malignancy , in this case multiple myeloma, together with Parkinson's disease, chemotherapy for his multiple myeloma , as well as underlying cardiovascular disease and hypertension. He was given superb care and yet he still succumbed. He had been vaccinated with the Pfizer product back in February but because of scheduling and other problems, he never received a 3rd booster dose which he should have gotten given his immune compromised state. Bottom line is that I do not think anything could have been done differently. Doctor Blaylock indicated to me that they are already receiving a lot of negative social media by anti-vaxxers who are now saying that was vaccinated but he still died; therefore, people should not get vaccinated. Typical anti-vaccine nonsense. Had a very productive conversation with my UK colleague Chris Whitty. There has been some recent reports a mini-surge in cases in the UK. The UK is considerably under vaccinating children compared to the United States. In addition, they do not require that children wear masks in school. Chris mentioned that the surge is among children and that for the first time we are seeing transmission from the children who are infected in school to their parents and relatives within the household. This is very different from prior assumptions that children do not transmit infection to adults. Chris thinks that this was true with the alpha variant which was not particularly transmissible. However, he feels that with the delta variant and its high degree of transmissibility that this is what we are now seeing. He gave us a heads up because the UK is usually about a month ahead of us in the dynamics of the outbreak. We may not be seeing this type of a surge since we are pushing very hard to vaccinate children. In fact, next week the FDA will look at the data from Pfizer on vaccinating children from 5 to 11 years old. One other point with the UK is that they are not enthusiastic about mandating vaccination even though they are doing well with having vaccinated about 85% of their population with at least one dose.