REST IN POWER COLIN POWELL (1937-2021)

We Lost a Giant today!  Colin Powell has died at 84.

Colin Luther Powell (/ˈkoʊlɪn/ KOHL-in;[] April 5, 1937 – October 18, 2021) was an American politician, diplomat, statesman, and four-star general who served as the 65th United States Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005. He was the first African-American Secretary of State.

 Prior to the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, he and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, were the highest-ranking African Americans in federal executive branch history (by virtue of the Secretary of State standing fourth in the presidential line of succession). He served as the 16th United States National Security Advisor from 1987 to 1989 and as the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993.

Powell, who was 84, was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and was fully vaccinated, according to his family. He also had multiple myeloma, a white blood cell cancer, according to the New York Times. 

Cancer, as well as the drugs that treat the disease, can suppress the immune system. So both the disease and old age are risk factors for COVID-19 complications and death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Multiple myeloma patients may be especially at risk, according to a small study published in Nature in July, which found that a third of patients with that diagnosis developed no immune response after the COVID-19 vaccine.

 "He was over the age of 80, he had cancer, and a treatment for his cancer made him vulnerable," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN medical analyst and professor of medicine at George Washington University, told CNN. Powell, he added, "represented our most vulnerable population in this country."

My Griend , Jimmy Greene said it best-

"Please don’t use General Powell’s death to suggest the vaccine doesn’t work. He was 84 years old and suffered from multiple myeloma and Parkinson’s disease. The vaccine, like a lot of vaccines, is not effective against blood cancer and the therapies related thereto. That has been very well documented. Colin Powell was a good man and a great American. Let’s not soil his memory with a lie to promote a conspiracy to placate an agenda he would have wanted no part of."