From ANN'S MEGA DUB:
Bros
I agree with Billy Eichner. From ROLLING STONE:
Ooooh, Billy Eichner just @’d the Supreme Court. While presenting an award at the 2022 VMAs on Sunday night, Eichner took the opportunity to promote his upcoming film Bros — the gay rom-com he wrote and stars in — by namedropping Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and advocating for more gay love onscreen.
“We need to show all the homophobes like Clarence Thomas and all the homophobes on the supreme court that we want gay love stories,” Eichner said. “And we support LGBTQ people. And we are not letting them drag us back into the last century because they are in the past, and Bros is the future. Are you with me, VMAs?”
Eichner spoke to Rolling Stone last month about the film and the impact he hopes it has on viewers.
“I’m in my forties, and I look around at movies in general — about straight people, about gay people, especially comedies — and say, “Where are the adults? What happened to the adults?” [Laughs.] I grew up with those great James L. Brooks movies and Nora Ephron movies and Woody Allen movies,” he said. “Those movies have disappeared entirely. I at least wanted to hold [Bros] to a higher standard than what’s passing for rom-coms these days.”
He added, “But as much as I love all those movies – Broadcast News, Moonstruck, Annie Hall, Tootsie – LGBTQ people are literally completely ignored and erased in those worlds. We weren’t even the best friend!”
Here are some trailers for his film Bros.
I want to see it. It's looks funny and it's been a long time since we've had a good romantic comedy.
It'll be released in the US on September 30th.
In other news, Benjamin Mateus (WSWS) reports:
In its latest guidelines, from August 8, 2022, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave one of its strongest recommendations to Paxlovid for patients at high risk of progressing to severe COVID-19, regardless of vaccination status. The list of underlying medical conditions that raise one’s risk of severe COVID-19 is long and accounts for more than four out of 10 adults (138 million Americans, including 54 million who are 65 or older). Close to 4 million prescriptions have been filled since Paxlovid was authorized.
However, the results of a new retrospective observational study out of Israel published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) seem to place a question mark over the strength of these recommendations, in particular, with the Omicron subvariant.
The report’s authors found that Pfizer’s antiviral medication Paxlovid offered little to no benefit for younger adults. However, it did reduce the risk of hospitalization for high-risk seniors. Notably, supplementary material from the original study of Paxlovid in high-risk non-hospitalized adults with COVID-19 during the Delta wave had demonstrated benefits in those younger than 65, albeit the difference compared to the placebo was much less than in those 65 and older.
The study’s authors utilized the electronic medical records from almost 110,000 patients enrolled in Clalit Health Services, Israel’s largest state-mandated health service organization. Nearly 4 percent, or 3,900 of the patients, had taken Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir) after contracting COVID-19.
Among those over 65, there was a 73 percent decrease in the hospitalization rate and a 79 percent reduction in the risk of death. However, patients between the ages of 40 and 65 saw no benefit in taking the antiviral medication in either category, regardless of previous immunity status.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"