Sometimes you don’t realize something has been missing until it appears, and you say, “Oh wait, where has that been all this time?” It happened this morning. For the first time in the 1½ years of Covid, I heard an ad on the radio for a clinical trial of a medication to be taken before patients need to be hospitalized, in the hope of preventing hospitalization.

For 1½ years, all we heard – including physicians like me – was what we should not do:

• Don’t use hydroxychloroquine! It’s new, unproven, very toxic, and worst of all, Trump mentioned it. In fact, the drug is a half-century old, minimally toxic, and taken for years by arthritis and lupus patients.

• Don’t use ivermectin! It’s new, unproven, very toxic, used only for horses, and worst of all, the hospital is full of overdoses. In fact, the drug is decades old, minimally toxic, used for parasites in humans, and the hospital in question had no overdose patients. Not one.

So do nothing at all if you fall ill with suspected or proven Covid. Just stay in bed, take fluids, and wait till you are hospitalized and on a ventilator. For that advice, you don’t need the CDC or the New England Journal of Medicine. That advice you could get from old Mrs. Heffelfart down the street.

There were drugs with antiviral activity. But with few exceptions, there were no clinical trials of pre-hospital treatment. We just sat around waiting for a vaccine that might never come. We’ve been waiting for an AIDS vaccine since 1981, and there still is none. There are effective drugs, however. So this was hardly a successful model to follow: Ignore early treatment, wait for a vaccine.

So why did we do it? I don’t know. Do you? Perhaps Dr. Fauci knows.

But having been less that resoundingly successful in its actual mission, the CDC now takes on the job of spreading wokeness. Check out this excerpt from its recent bulletin:

• “We must confront the systems and policies that have resulted in the generational injustice that has given rise to health inequities.” Instead of gender-specific pronouns like him or her, use “they,” even when referring to one person. And talk about “parents” or “expectant parents” instead of mothers or fathers.

Early treatment for Covid to prevent hospitalization and possible death? That’s not a priority. But referring to a patient as “them” – oh yes, that’s what really important. The CDC works on being woke instead of being well. Meanwhile, the Pentagon works on White rage instead of leaving no one behind. There, don’t you feel better now?