First up is the latest TWiV: TWiV 1156: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin.

Seemingly every week Daniel has another horror story of a patient who ends up in ICU (or worse) because a doctor didn’t prescribe Paxlovid:

I’ve got a woman in her 80s, she’s in the ICU, and the story was, she goes to see an ENT because she’s having some symptoms a few days after the Jewish holidays… The ENT diagnoses her with Covid, says, hey I’m going to send you to your primary so they can get you on Paxlovid. She goes to her primary, the primary says, oh you know, you’re on a statin and I’m a little worried about the drug interactions, why don’t we wait and see how you do?

Yeah, so now she’s in the ICU!!! Okay, so what are you supposed to do? What did the experts say? Number one Paxlovid, number two Remdesivir.

So Daniel the patient with the statin conflict, what would you have done?

So statins are an easy one. There’s a few that we should have memorized. If you’re on a Statin you stop the statin for a week. It doesn’t matter like oh, have you taken your Statin today. If you took your Statin today and you started Paxlovid, the Statin is just going to remain at a high you know, remain at whatever level it is for a longer period of time it doesn’t shoot up.

And here’s the episode description:

In his weekly clinical update, Dr. Griffin updates us about polio SIA campaign in Gaza, the durability of protection following administration of GSK’s recombinant antigen RSV vaccine, mpox in an Ugandan jail, the Marburg virus outbreak in Rwanda, before reviewing the recent statistics on SARS-CoV-2 infection, the WasterwaterScan dashboard, immunogenicity, reactogenicity and safety of different COVID-19 vaccine platforms, disease severity in those not previously vaccinated with those vaccinated but not infected, where to find PEMGARDA, a reminder of how and when to use steroids to treat COVID-19, what do when healthcare workers succumb to SARS-CoV-2 infection, if COVID-19 doubles the risk for heart attacks, stroke and death and if COVID-19 affects the regions of the brainstem.

Then for something completely different, try the Reveal podcast episode entitled In God We Vote.

A small church in a small town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has been flexing its political muscle and building an outsized reputation for blurring the line between church and state. Pastor Don Lamb wants his congregants to be engaged in spiritual warfare and not be “head-in-the-sand, Jesus-loves-you kind of Christians,” especially when it comes to the local school board. 

To Lamb, this is not a Christian takeover. Yet his church is influenced by an elusive, hard-to-pin-down movement whose followers believe that Christians are called to control the government and that former President Donald Trump was chosen by God. It’s called the New Apostolic Reformation, and it’s nothing like the culture war–fueled Moral Majority of yesteryear. There are prophets and apostles, and a spiritual war is underway, not just in Pennsylvania. To win, the church has to do more than just preach the gospel; it has to get political.

This week, Reveal’s Najib Aminy and Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler explain what the New Apostolic Reformation is and what happens when it seeps into small-town churches like Lamb’s.