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South Pole Medevac (2016)

southpolestation.com

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Re: South Pole Medevac (2016)

#2
"That patient is seasonally employed through the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract, the prime contract for operations and research support contractor to NSF for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). NSF is not releasing any further personal or medical information to preserve patient privacy."

That's a curious statement given that NSF has often heavily publicized medical issues researchers have had, including identifying the people involved and their condition, like the doctor(s) who have had to operate on themselves, or people who found out they had cancer while at the station, or the researcher who had a stroke. How did "patient privacy" not apply there? And HIPAA does not apply to anyone except "care providers."

Despite intense pressure, the NSF refused to medevac the stroke patient for two months. But some Lockheed employee gets "sick" and they get a very complex, expensive, dangerous rescue mission? Why?

There was extensive coverage of this medevac operation; NSF provided lots of media and statements, etc...but tightly controlled who was allowed to take photos. Why?

Why is the NSF hiding who the involved parties were, and the source of their injury or illness?

The other question: why did we foot the bill for this? LM had a multi-billion-dollar contract to supply services. If one of their employees needs to be medevac'd out, especially for reasons that won't withstand scrutiny, LM can pay for it themselves...

Re: South Pole Medevac (2016)

#3

"That patient is seasonally employed through the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract, the prime contract for operations and research support contractor to NSF for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). NSF is not releasing any further personal or medical information to preserve patient privacy." That's a curious statement given that NSF has often heavily publicized medical issues researchers have had, inc…

You likely know this, but for those like me that didn’t, the stroke medivac occurred after this - in early 2017.

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=190954

Re: South Pole Medevac (2016)

#4

"That patient is seasonally employed through the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract, the prime contract for operations and research support contractor to NSF for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). NSF is not releasing any further personal or medical information to preserve patient privacy." That's a curious statement given that NSF has often heavily publicized medical issues researchers have had, inc…

[deleted]

Re: South Pole Medevac (2016)

#5

"That patient is seasonally employed through the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract, the prime contract for operations and research support contractor to NSF for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). NSF is not releasing any further personal or medical information to preserve patient privacy." That's a curious statement given that NSF has often heavily publicized medical issues researchers have had, inc…

If that contract is cost-plus and the medevac is a cost related to the project, well, we’re going to pay for it anyway. Which seems reasonable to me, to be honest, for anything remotely related to the reason we were paying for that employee-by-proxy to be there.

Re: South Pole Medevac (2016)

#6

"That patient is seasonally employed through the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract, the prime contract for operations and research support contractor to NSF for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). NSF is not releasing any further personal or medical information to preserve patient privacy." That's a curious statement given that NSF has often heavily publicized medical issues researchers have had, inc…

Obviously this isn't true but gosh I wish this were a larger-than-life example of the trope of the military conducting a secret investigation of a crashed alien spacecraft buried within Antarctica. This trope appears over and over again, including in The Thing, Alien vs Predator, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and lots of other fiction. My favorite instance of this trope is in the amazing final book of the trilogy The Perfect Run by Maxime J. Durand.

Re: South Pole Medevac (2016)

#7

"That patient is seasonally employed through the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract, the prime contract for operations and research support contractor to NSF for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). NSF is not releasing any further personal or medical information to preserve patient privacy." That's a curious statement given that NSF has often heavily publicized medical issues researchers have had, inc…

Obviously this isn't true but gosh I wish this were a larger-than-life example of the trope of the military conducting a secret investigation of a crashed alien spacecraft buried within Antarctica. This trope appears over and over again, including in The Thing, Alien vs Predator, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and lots of other fiction. My favorite instance of this trope is in the amazing final book of the trilogy T…

If I were writing a story about this, I would have the IceCube / IceTop / DeepCore neutrino observatory be a cover-up for drilling deep sampling tunnels into the submerged alien ship, through which robotic probes would be deployed into the wreck. https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/icecube/ Perhaps in the story, there's a still-active hostile AI inside the ship and robots that are brought back up have been reprogrammed to hurt the human staff and then sneak aboard the medivac aircraft to reach the mainland and physically infiltrate key data centers, or something like that.

Re: South Pole Medevac (2016)

#8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously this isn't true but gosh I wish this were a larger-than-life example of the trope of the military conducting a secret investigation of a crashed alien spacecraft buried within Antarctica. This trope appears over and over again, including in The Thing, Alien vs Predator, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and lots of other fiction. My favorite instance of this trope is in the amazing final book of the trilogy T…

If I were writing a story about this, I would have the IceCube / IceTop / DeepCore neutrino observatory be a cover-up for drilling deep sampling tunnels into the submerged alien ship, through which robotic probes would be deployed into the wreck. https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/icecube/ Perhaps in the story, there's a still-active hostile AI inside the ship and robots that are brought back up have been reprogrammed…

I am sure you are familiar with the details since you are spot on. Look into it a little bit, definitely a lot of strange things going on surrounding IceCube.

Re: South Pole Medevac (2016)

#9

"That patient is seasonally employed through the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract, the prime contract for operations and research support contractor to NSF for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). NSF is not releasing any further personal or medical information to preserve patient privacy." That's a curious statement given that NSF has often heavily publicized medical issues researchers have had, inc…

I can see a legal situation where government employees must be identified but contractor individuals don't fall under the same regulations
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