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Dominion Post
05-08-2025
- Health
- Dominion Post
Fairmont's MVA clinic providing progressive care for nearly 70 years
FAIRMONT – In the early morning hours of Nov. 20, 1968, with smoke still roiling from the ruined No. 9 Mine, a team from the Fairmont Clinic was already on the road. A series of horrific explosions tore through the coal mine near Farmington in outlying Marion County. Those who weren't killed instantly – the first explosion rattled windows 20 miles away in Fairmont – would die wrenching deaths in the hours that followed, from poisonous gases that had layered and led to the disaster in the first place. Meanwhile, a team of physicians and nurses from the clinic, along with associated social workers and clergy, arrived and went to work, digging in before most of Marion County even knew what happened. The handful of survivors pulled to the surface received immediate medical care. Families of the miners who perished received counseling services and other attention in the days that followed. This week is National Health Care Center Week, and the Fairmont Clinic, now known as the MVA Health Center, is still doing its work from its Frank Lloyd Wright-styled facilities on Locust Avenue in Fairmont. While the name has changed, that's the only thing, CEO Raymond Alvarez said. 'We're still providing services to families in Fairmont and the county,' he said. 'That's why we started in the first place.' In 1958, the year the clinic was founded, the West Virginia University Medical Center was still two years off. Regional networks of the medical variety, Alvarez said, were still unheard of in mainly rural West Virginia. 'Families needed access to care,' he said. 'Especially families with husbands and fathers who dug coal for a living.' Dr. Edward Vacher Jr., a local physician, opened the practice that would become the Fairmont clinic in a small house on Locust Avenue, with the living room serving as the waiting area and the kitchen standing in for the nurse's station. Two bedrooms were also converted to exam rooms, with space in the basement partitioned as business offices. A Chicago architect was commissioned to design its current location, which was heralded in the industry for its contemporary stylings when it opened in 1965. What you don't see, Alvarez said – a progressive infrastructure in the culture of the place – is just as important. Non-discriminatory policies, both for hiring and for patients presenting for care, were quickly enacted in that first year at the direction of Thelma Shaw, a longtime community benefactor and activist. Rose Cousins, a pioneering Black aviator in Fairmont whose high school and college classmate was Tuskegee Airman George 'Spanky' Roberts, was hired and worked her way up to a key administrative position. 'I like that we were able to respond so quickly to Farmington,' Alvarez said. 'I like that we hired Mrs. Cousins. And here we are, 67 years later.'
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Elon Musk Is an Evil Piece of Garbage—and an A-Level Fraud Too
When I was growing up in Morgantown, West Virginia, I remember very well when that new building went up at the end of Willowdale Road, near the West Virginia University Medical Center and not too far from my friend Doug's house. These days, Morgantown—driven by the university in general and by what they now call the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center, in particular—is a sprawling small city, with townhouses and shopping centers and office buildings having swallowed the acres of woods where my friends and I used to play. But in 1970, it was kind of a big deal when a spanking new building like that was conjured into being; this one was of particular interest because it was something different: a federal government building, bringing a little slice of Washington to town. If you've been following the news, you may know that I'm referring to the NIOSH building—the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which for 55 years employed dedicated researchers in Morgantown studying the effects of black lung on coal miners. Black lung, or pneumoconiosis, occurs when coal dust is inhaled and has killed many men before their time; it killed one of my grandfathers in his fifties. Pap, whom I never knew, died way before the federal government managed to overcome the coal operators' fierce resistance to even acknowledging that coal mining could expose one to harm and established NIOSH through an act of Congress. But once that happened, laboratories were established in Morgantown and six other cities to research occupational safety, in the mines and other dangerous workplaces. Some 200 people worked at the lab in my hometown and from the mobile van they used to travel across coal country to perform checks on miners, sometimes literally right outside the mine gate. Until Elon Musk. Those 200 people were fired in early April by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Controversy ensued, and many of them have been temporarily rehired, but they're slated to be fired again in June. Labs in Pittsburgh and in Spokane, Washington, were also eliminated. As Musk steps back from DOGE, we're getting a number of assessments of his 'accomplishments.' They're generally harsh. He vowed to slash $2 trillion in 'wasteful' federal spending (the federal government spends just under $7 trillion a year). He recently acknowledged it'll be more like $150 billion. However, his 'cuts' will also cost American taxpayers $135 billion, according to one estimate, because it turns out that some of these bloodsucking deep staters save taxpayers money. But even $150 billion is a grotesque lie. Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times' David French: 'So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.' That's harsh, all right. But it's not only or even mainly on fiscal grounds that he deserves our contempt. The cuts are leaving thousands of good people unemployed. And they will literally kill people. Coal miners will die prematurely. Children all over the world will die from malaria and other diseases because of the demise of USAID, which Musk called a 'criminal organization.' In fact, this is already happening: Children with AIDS in Africa have died because of the elimination of a President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, outreach program. That's just the beginning of the enormous pain these cuts will inflict across the world. And the richest man on the planet, who grew up amid vast wealth from his father's emerald-mining operations and has never known hardship or had to rely on a government service in his life (unless you count $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits for his companies), is responsible for every drop of it. Thursday night, MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle and Jacob Soboroff hosted a fantastic special from Washington, in which they gathered some 50 federal workers from around the country to talk about what they did, why they loved their jobs, and how this will hurt people. One person, Scott Laney, was a Morgantown-based epidemiologist who spoke eloquently about the dedication of the people he worked with. Keri Murphy of the Commerce Department was working to implement the CHIPS and Science Act—that is, bringing jobs back to America in just the way Donald Trump says he wants. 'That's why I thought I was safe,' Murphy told Soboroff. Tamara Maze of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said: 'All federal workers I've ever known are in it because we want to serve the country.' It was important television, and if you have a chance to watch it this weekend, you should. MSNBC, if they're interested in my two cents, should start a weekly show dedicated to federal workers. I wish they'd started one years ago, in which case stories of these dedicated professionals would have infiltrated the discourse and countered the toxic right-wing propaganda about these workers, whom even most Democrats have rarely bothered to defend. If such a show had existed, maybe DOGE never would have happened. It's still not too late. As the Chinese say, 'The best time to have planted a tree was 20 years ago; the second-best time is now.' Be that as it may: Musk is a poisonous human being. He may be good at making money (with the help of government subsidies), but he is planet Earth's greatest walking proof that that skill does not automatically confer other skills, despite how much our culture (and especially right-wing media) lionizes the super-rich. Musk is stupid about a great many things, and especially about government administration and public service. He is incompetent. He is cruel. And he is sinister. Am I overdoing it? Consider the other big piece of Musk news this week, which came to us courtesy of a chilling op-ed in The New York Times Wednesday, by investigative journalist Julia Angwin. In it, she spun the tale of how Musk and his Muskrats are doing nothing less than compiling a vast database on every one of us: 'assembling a sprawling surveillance system,' she writes, 'the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.' Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to describe the details. You see, the databases of most executive branch agencies are siloed off from one another. There is a reason for this—so the CIA can't get your Social Security information. The DOGE team, with its usual combination of evil intent and clumsy ineptitude, is trying to break down these walls so that the Trump White House can have a thorough file on each of us just a couple clicks away. One whistleblower 'alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data.' House Democrats, I'm told, aren't yet willing to impute to Musk the malign motivation that Angwin does. But why should we doubt that a man who praises dictators and thinks the neo-Nazi AfD party is Germany's only hope would hesitate at the idea of a surveillance state? As Angwin meticulously details, what we know about DOGE's infiltration of those databases points pretty clearly in that direction. Tesla's board says it supports Musk as CEO and that The Wall Street Journal's report that he's being shoved out is false. Fine. Tesla, which he did not found and which he's now running into the ground, can have him. Let panels fly off those hideous Cybertrucks. Just please give this destroyer of worlds a smaller world to destroy. This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
