Colin Powell dies of “COVID complications”
RIP Colin Powell, who was 84 and reportedly died of “COVID complications” despite being “fully vaccinated.” I’ll leave others to discuss the ups and downs of his career, except to say that, to the best of my recollection, he was mostly admired for his role in the first Iraq War and often condemned for his presentation regarding WMDs in the second.
When I saw the phrase “COVID complications” it immediately raised a familiar red flag because I’ve heard the phrase before and speculated about it. It’s vague and seems to blame COVID for everything that might happen when a person is diagnosed with it. I wondered what else might have been medically wrong with Powell, and sure enough I later saw that he’d had multiple myeloma for several years. The article says he’d been “successfully treated” for it, but I think that’s quite misleading.
I have some knowledge of that disease because I’ve known three people who had it (all now unfortunately deceased), two relatives and one acquaintance. “Successful treatment” doesn’t usually mean a cure or even that the person is out of the woods. MM is a cruel disease with many and varied systemic results, and one of them is that a person can easily fall prey to almost any infection. MM patients commonly die of pneumonia, but they can die of almost any bacterial or viral disease (see this, for example). Multiple myeloma is also not often diagnosed early, and once the diagnosis is made the patient is usually considered to be in late-stage illness. Older patients – such as Powell – have an even poorer prognosis, and if he’s been treated for MM for “several years” I’m going to assume that at this point he was on borrowed time anyway.
So anyone who uses his death to make a more general point about COVID is walking on thin ice. The only think I think it’s valid to say about his case is that demonstrates that vaccinated people can contract COVID despite being vaccinated, but we already knew that. I don’t think the severity of Powell’s COVID is relevant to anyone except other severely immunologically-compromised patients.
The really sad part of this is we should be gathering coherent data on this disease and the left is doing everything they can to pad the numbers.
I’ve known several people with multiple myeloma and I don’t think immune deficiency was a major factor in their deaths. Pneumonia is still not far from “The old man’s friend.” It is the final common pathway for many cancer deaths. I do think the general inanition of cancer may be a factor.
Comments today bantering around he had advanced cancer, 84 years as Neo wrote but was fully Fake Vaxed. Served a long time but went to the Dark Side backing Barak then in the previous administration going full #NeverTrump.
Mike K:
It’s not that people with MM don’t sometimes die of other causes than infection. But infections are a very common cause of death for them, and If you read the literature, it says quite clearly that infections are a huge and common danger to people with MM. When a person close to me was first diagnosed, he was told that infections – especially pneumonia – were an enormous risk. That is indeed how he died.
After all, although most cancers increase susceptibility to infection, MM directly affects the immune system:
In Powell’s case, he also reportedly had Parkinson’s disease. Combined with the multiple myeloma, he was medically fragile. RIP.
We’ve had several friends and relations with the disease. My understanding is that it’s a death sentence, but there’s been a great deal of progress over the last 20 years or so in developing therapies which extend your lifespan and alleviate symptoms. The median survival was once about two years. A relation of ours diagnosed in 2005 was told five years was the median (she lasted for nine), and it’s gotten longer since.
Art Deco:
Around 2013 my relative was told 2-3 years. Perhaps it depends on one’s age plus how far advanced the disease is when diagnosed.
Multiple myeloma is considered incurable, but it can be sent into remission, sometimes for years.
I’ll put this moment HERE
Viva Frei: 14-Year Old Dies FROM Covid? Fake News Does It Again!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZNbSttBeZE
Well, except… no, not in any way, shape, or form did this unfortunate child die from Covid. The merdia lies, the doctor lied, it is utter and complete bullshit from the word after “Dies”.
In general, you cannot trust ANY “Died from Covid” claim in any way, shape, or form, any longer, at least when it’s the merdia making the claim.
These people should be ashamed of themselves.
Except…
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
— Jonathan Swift —
I lost all respect — which was formerly considerable — for Powell when he backed Obama.
By now, the degree of my indifference as to his fate very rapidly approaches zero asymptotically… faster than the Gamma function to the -1 power, in fact.
I won’t speak ill of the dead but I have nothing good to say of him as a public figure.
I had a Friend who died in July. Last winter, he was fine. In the spring, he felt tired. His doctor said his hemoglobin was low. It took the doctor a few weeks to figure it out. By Summer he was dead. Colin was a good man. he served his country well.
His life demonstrated that systemic racism is a lie.
Flights of angles, sing him to his rest. May his memory be a blessing to his family, and the United States of America.
Walter Sobchak: “His life demonstrated that systemic racism is a lie.”
Yes, yes it did. He served his nation well as a soldier and Secretary of State. Roe through the ranks to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. No mean feat. How his politics changed in later years is unfortunate. May he RIP.
As you stated covid is just the new pneumonia – the disease that takes away the old and infirm. Hundreds of thousands used to die of it every year (who were dying of other things), but there was no panic since it was only a disease a debilitated immune system fell to. Now it’s replaced by more transmissible deadly Covid, which like pneumonia is still not a threat to the young and healthy.
So I’m not sure why they publicized this. My grandfather technically died of pneumonia, but the obit said “of lung cancer”. Everyone thought pneumonia was a blessing versus the alternative.
How his politics changed in later years is unfortunate.
I think a wag said he favored the Republicans in federal elections as long as he had a prospect of being on the payroll.
I lost all respect — which was formerly considerable — for Powell when he backed Obama.
Blood will tell.
Balanced assessment of Powell by Kurt Schlichter:
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/10/19/colin-powell-and-the-crisis-of-the-boomer-elite-n2597632
“Like many luminaries of the Boomer establishment, Powell provided a certain gravity and dignity to an elite rapidly filling up with young, woke, unaccomplished hacks. Though he was firmly on the side of the woke pronoun people by the end, he was not one of them. He picked up a rifle; they picked a gender. Powell was a serious man who found himself allied with unserious people.”
By choice, it must be said.
Also: “Powell gave no indication that he had any sense of the betrayals normal Americans felt, of the security stripped from them both economically and culturally by the policies of people like him. After all, the target of their populist anger was the insular ruling caste that he was a huge part of. Instead, it was easier for him to ascribe the rejection of people like him to their knuckle dragging ignorance or, more darkly, their racism.
But the American people did not reject Colin Powell and his ilk because the American people are bad, but because the elite is so bad at being elite.”
Correct.
I was not a Powell admirer. I suppose that is a minority opinion; and perhaps it is churlish to say it. I am suspicious of any General who brushed against politics as he, or she, advanced. Serving as a White House Fellow is a prime example. Then there is the case of Bush and Rumsfeld taking all of the heat for the post victory debacle that Iraq became, while Powell and Armitage actually orchestrated the strategy. Just as Armitage (and Powell?) sat on exculpatory knowledge while Scooter Libby was persecuted, they were very quiet about about who was pulling the strings after Saddam was beaten.
It is clear that Powell will go down in history as a great statesman, and commander. After all, I just read that he won the “First Gulf War”; which probably came as a surprise to General Schwarzkopf . So it is written, so it shall be.
I strongly suspect that Powell died of Multiple Myeloma, possibly complicated by COVID. Multiple Myeloma may be considered survivable; but, it will often get you in the end. A dear friend fought it for six years, including stem cell transplants, but it finally wore her down and killed her; as it did my brother (who had other complications.) Both were considerably younger than 84.
When he fought America’s enemies I wished him success. Then he decided to ally with them and I wished him gone.
“Like many luminaries of the Boomer establishment…”
Powell was born in 1937. He was part of the “Silent Generation” which formed the leadership of most all the movements, good and bad, which the, later born, Boomers get honored or blamed for since some, perhaps many, of them were the witting or unwitting foot-soldiers of those movements. The “New Left” and the “Civil Rights” movements being a couple of examples.
I saw Powell speak at Hamilton College back in the 1990s, before his career as Secretary of State for the Bush Administration. Certainly at the time I respected him for his military service, leadership, and his choice to not play the race card; my respect for him has fallen off some with time.
I never thought much of Powell. He held the same position as today’s Gen. Milley, Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff. Like Austin, I suspect he was promoted because of skin color and not pure merit.
I recall an old statement of his: “I do not want to fight a war in which our victory is not certain”, or words to that effect. That is not a warrior’s statement.
What exactly were his major achievements as SOS? I do not recall. He did push for a separate Palestinian state while in that office!
As to his death, multiple myeloma is 100% guaranteed to be fatal in the elderly.
Arising in the bone marrow, its eradication, followed by a stem cell infusion to repopulate the chemotherapy-blitzed bone marrow where all your red blood cell, platelet, and white blood cell precursors reside is a major undertaking, not always successful, and requiring weeks of terribly low blood counts, hospitalization with isolation against infections, is a major ordeal. Not everyone survives this assault. It is not usually done for people over 65.
Fortunately there are new drugs, thalidomide derivatives, etc. which do not require the heroic stem cell Rx.
He also had Parkinson’s, right?
But the family says COVID killed him. A bunch of medical wizards, surely.
Hubert:
Good of you to cite Kurt Schlicter’s balanced assessment of Powell.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/10/19/colin-powell-and-the-crisis-of-the-boomer-elite-n2597632
I recommend it too. Schlichter is well-qualified to speak of Powell’s military accomplisments. However, Schlichter also noted:
____________________________
Powell became a reliably Democrat-voting Republican, the kind CNN would wheel out every election cycle to explain how actual Republicans are terrible.
____________________________
Exactly.
Powell was born in 1937. He was part of the “Silent Generation” which formed the leadership of most all the movements, good and bad, which the, later born, Boomers get honored or blamed for since some, perhaps many, of them were the witting or unwitting foot-soldiers of those movements. The “New Left” and the “Civil Rights” movements being a couple of examples.
I think behavioral variables (esp a tendency to resort to divorce courts) suggest there’s a hinge around the 1938 cohort, not the 1946 cohort. (As to the term ‘Baby Boom’, the upward trajectory in the size of birth cohorts ran from 1936 to 1957; there was an abrupt increase from 1945 to 1946 of 21%, but ordinary incremental increases before and after).
In re the black organizations, MLK (b. 1929), James Forman (b. 1928), Robert Moses (b. 1935), and Marion Barry (b. 1936) would qualify as ‘Silents’. Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, James Farmer, Floyd McKissick, Ralph David Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Bayard Rustin, Medgar Evers, and Whitney Young were Greatest Generation. Roy Wilkins (b 1901) was older than that. Four of the seven characters who ran the SNCC during its life were born after 1938.
In re the pacifist / red-haze organizations: Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Richard Flacks, and the entire Weather Underground crew were born after 1938. David Dellinger (b. 1915) was a GG, as were Leonard Boudin and William Kuntsler. Andre Schiffrin (b. 1935), Carl Oglesby (b. 1935), and Victor Navasky (b. 1932) were Silents, but Oglesby was the only one prominent at the time. The gurus like Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and Murray Bookchin were of similar vintage to Dellinger. Noam Chomsky, Charles Reich, and Theodore Roszak were Silents. Terence Hallinan was a Silent, his father from the Lost Generation.
Geoffb. I was born in 1935, so I fit into the generation you supposedly describe. I do not know where of you speak.
Huxley: Powell was not one of my heroes. Far from it. I regarded him as a standard-issue DoD apparatchik and D.C. operator. Schlichter’s piece reminded me that he was a slightly better brand of apparatchik than we have now. In other words: he had served in combat, he was wounded in action, and he was at least capable of competence in his profession. I suspect he would have regarded pre-emptively surrendering to the enemy as odd behavior for a military man. That alone raises him to empyrean heights relative to the current lot.
And no, Powell was not, technically, a boomer. He was born about ten years too early.
What Hubert, said.
@ Ray > “When he fought America’s enemies I wished him success. Then he decided to ally with them and I wished him gone.”
This describes so many people!
I’m sad that it is too long for a bumper sticker.
If one finds value in the Strauss & Howe conjecture that America cycles through a sequence of four generation types, one notes that the Boomers were largely led by members of the Greatest Generation.
Culture leaders like J.D. Salinger and Timothy Leary were born in 1919, 1920 respectively.
It’s easy to complain about Boomers, but we came straight out of the GG’s hopes and dreams of what life could be for their children and grandchildren.
Culture leaders like J.D. Salinger and Timothy Leary were born in 1919, 1920 respectively.
Salinger never aspired to be a leader and he published not a word from 1966 until his death.
That is a principle that never made any sense to me. LOL
Deco: whether Salinger aspired to be a culture leader is irrelevant to the point that Huxley is making. So is Salinger’s publishing record. Whether he aspired to it or not, he was a culture leader to the Boomer generation.
Harper Lee (born 1926) published one book during her lifetime and spent most of her life after that as a recluse in small-town Alabama (instead of small-town New Hampshire). She didn’t aspire to be a culture leader either, but she was and still is, although we’ll see how long that lasts in the age of Woke.
Huxley’s point about the G.I. Generation giving birth to the Boomers literally and culturally is valid. As for the Strauss/Howe theory of the four generation types, this is the first I’ve heard of it. It would appear that we’re pretty well into the Crisis phase. Oh goody. My personal shorthand for what some of us have been living through for the past 40-50 years is The Great Dismantling.
My understanding is that MM is still not considered curable. When I was diagnosed, I was told it was “treatable but not curable”. However, I think they may have to start adding the word “yet”. There are a number of patients who are really starting to look cured. Indeed, experts have said the main issue in declaring anything to be a cure is going to be telling the difference between a cure and a very long remission.
That being said, some forms of the cancer turn out to be more aggressive than others, and I seem to have drawn the short straw. The good news is, they keep coming out with new treatments every year, including treatments that operate by different mechanisms, rather than doubling down on what last year’s drugs did.
But my ears did prick up when I heard that Colin Powell had been contending with MM. We come not to praise him, nor even to bury him, but we do note his passing.
Powerline linked the State Department’s tribute to General Powell – a posting of his Thirteen Rules of Leadership.
https://www.state.gov/dipnote-u-s-department-of-state-official-blog/colin-l-powells-thirteen-rules-of-leadership/
I’m hardpressed to name one that the Department, and DC in total, has not broken repeatedly.
Well, they did get certain things done, and do have a vision which they are demanding we follow, but I don’t think those particular actions are in keeping with the rest of the list.
It’s not going to look better in the morning any time soon.
AF, I would tend to agree, but I think this list of thirteen rules (no doubt echoing Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith) has been condensed slightly.
For example:
“It ain’t as bad as you think! It will look better in the morning.” is missing “…after the coverup” at the end.
(Guess there wasn’t enough room for all those pixels. Should also add that that “ain’t” is a rather stylish touch…)
“Get mad then get over it.” is missing “…then get even madder then get even.”
(Same reason: gotta save on those pixels. Should also add that even commas should be jettisoned for the cause…)
Etc.
I think, though, that they forgot to mention the 14th and most important rule (i.e., Article of Faith). OTOH, it’s so obvious there’s really no need to mention it (besides, as mentioned above, it’s important to keep it at 13 AND you gotta save those pixels)….
FWIW:
“Make the suckers do what we say, not what we do…”