Tommy John, COVID-denying namesake of medical marvel, hospitalized with COVID

From The Daily Beast today comes a story that might make you chuckle about your own cantankerous grandfather if it wasn’t so dangerous, sad, and yet another symbol of just how this country devolved into a hellscape.

Tommy John, a name typically associated with a medical marvel that has saved countless pitching careers including his own, is currently hospitalized in California with COVID-19. He was diagnosed with it after losing motor function during a trip to Nashville and subsequent return to California, according to the Post. He has been in and out of the hospital for weeks, and is now on oxygen. Of course, he doesn’t think he should be.

“These people here would put you on anything!” John said during a phone interview he cut short by hanging up, according to the report.

To review, California has seen 35,000 new cases of the virus every day the past week. Someone dies of COVID in the L.A. area every 15 minutes. California has a zero percent capacity in its ICUs. Ambulance crews are being told to only transfer the most desperate to hospitals. Los Angeles also fears running out of oxygen supplies for patients, so yes clearly this is something doctors and hospitals are willy-nilly just throwing around simply to win a bar bet.

We’re used to grumpy old men having some pretty jaded views on anything and everything, but this has always been the danger and continues to be as the virus runs rampant and any vaccine rollout is threatened by those who won’t take it because the hair in their ears has rooted in their brain.

You would think that a man whose name is forever attached with the surgery to repair a torn elbow ligament — a procedure that saved his pitching career and was developed by, you know, a doctor — would have more respect for the profession.

John’s deranged views apparently spread through the family, as his eldest son, John III, a chiropractor in San Diego, has a habit of publishing online his galaxy-brained thoughts about how the virus is totally fake and we just have to want it to go away. Expect him to become Novak Djokovic’s official chiropractor any day now. Even with his dad in the hospital and getting worse, John III was still claiming that the virus was just an idea. It’s this kind of thinking that ended with Ted Williams and his son frozen in a tube in Arizona.