Bringing back this 2016 banger:
Hi! During the upheaval of your glorious revolution, I need to know what kind of healthcare you'll have in place.
People who depend on steady supplies of lifesaving medication don't suddenly stop existing during a revolution.
Lots of folks working on mutual aid and developing capacity to take care of one another. Fwiw I don't think anyone sees a glorious revolution coming, but if things keep being this badly mismanaged things will fall apart on their own.
Some of us can't be taken care of without meds which require massive, extremely expensive supply chains and extremely fancy labs. Plus institutional knowledge.
Look up the manufacturing process for intravenous immunoglobulin.
I'll admit I am not a logistics/global supply chain expert, but I will take your word for it. I think we should do what we can to get more involved in these systems because lives are on the line if they falter, and the status quo is seeming more untenable every day.
A month's supply of IVIG requires somewhere between 15,000 & 50,000 plasma donations in raw materials, and the purity requirements are so high that a lot of it gets thrown out.
Without it, my autoimmune lung disease would gradually suffocate me.
Fwiw I'll go donate plasma on Monday. I don't have answers on how to keep something this complicated going, but I'll do what I can to make sure it does.
Seriously, it's treating at least three disorders I've been diagnosed with. And one of them is novel, previously undocumented. Closest thing to the mythological Panacea I've ever seen.
There's a class divide in who gets it, too. It's only given out as a last resort as a rule, which means people with solid diagnoses of things that are often very hard to get diagnosed. If it was less scarce, it wouldn't be as difficult.
