America's vaccine failure

[Rach3]

Per NYT today, in different articles:

From the Coronavirus Newsletter:


" I have volunteered to give Covid vaccines at a mass vaccination site. Yesterday I wasted 10 Covid vaccines because we couldn’t find enough arms to put them in. Haves and have-nots? Absolutely. My family in Guatemala can’t get vaccines and here I am, in the U.S., putting them in the trash."

— Linda Albrecht, Bristol, Conn.

Celeste, a newsletter reader from Dayton, Ohio, wrote in with her own experience:

“The first day of The Great Unmasking at work went exactly as you’d expect: people who have previously bragged about not being vaccinated walking around without masks on,” she wrote. “Assuming people would act unselfishly to protect others goes against everything we’ve seen so far this pandemic.”

Eli Finkel, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, who has studied romantic relationships and American politics, said that trusting one another inherently involved a gamble — whether it is letting your guard down in a marriage, or trusting the behavior of fellow citizens during a pandemic. But in the case of the coronavirus, the benefit of trust — and widespread honesty — would be a collective freedom from the pandemic restrictions. But so far, it seems, Americans haven’t made that leap.

“It’s almost like American society has crossed the Rubicon of distrust,” Finkel said. “Even those things that should bring us together don’t, and even push us further apart.”

From the daily NYT:

https://tinyurl.com/pvytz8tj

" Getting everyone vaccinated in the United States has become much harder now that demand for the Covid-19 vaccine is flagging. America’s vaccination strategy needs to change to address this, and it starts with understanding the specific reasons people have not been vaccinated yet.

The conventional approach to understanding whether someone will get vaccinated is asking people how likely they are to get the vaccine and then building a demographic profile based on their answers: Black, white, Latinx, Republican, Democrat. But this process isn’t enough: Just knowing that Republicans are less likely to get vaccinated doesn’t tell us how to get them vaccinated. It’s more important to understand why people are still holding out, where those people live and how to reach them.

After conducting a national survey of U.S. adults, we grouped people into distinct profiles based on their shared beliefs and barriers to getting the vaccine. This approach, borrowed from the marketing world, is called psychobehavioral segmentation. It will allow health officials to target their strategies in ways that ignore demographic categories, like age and race. In the United States, we used this approach to identify five distinct personas: the Enthusiasts, the Watchful, the Cost-Anxious, the System Distrusters and the Covid Skeptics.

People in each segment share some beliefs and barriers about Covid-19 vaccination. And each persona includes at least some of every demographic: Republicans, Black people, the middle class, young people and others.

Here are the groups health officials need to reach — and how to reach them, based on their fears, concerns and barriers.

Share of Covid Skeptics : National average: 14%

Covid Skeptics are at the far end of the spectrum as the least likely to get vaccinated. The primary barrier for people in this group are their specific, deeply held beliefs about Covid-19. Everyone in this group believes at least one conspiracy theory related to the pandemic, whether it’s that microchips are implanted with the Covid vaccine; Covid-19 has been exploited by the government to control people; or that the pandemic was caused by a ring of people who secretly manipulate world events.

We found Covid Skeptics are common in Arkansas, North Dakota and Nevada. Considering that 84 percent of this group believe that the government is exploiting Covid-19 to control people, leaders of vaccination campaigns should consider tapping nonpolitical figures to mobilize this group. Doctors are trusted by 50 percent of this group, while scientists are trusted by 32 percent. They could also use religious leaders, who may resonate best with 9 percent of group members who say the vaccine goes against their religious beliefs.

The key to engaging this group will be to avoid trying to debunk what they believe; rather, experts need to listen, acknowledge how they feel and then share the facts. Our research finds that emphasizing that vaccination is their own, personal choice — one that can help them protect friends and family members — can also work.

The share of Cost-Anxious : 9 % national average

The Cost-Anxious worry about the time and potential expense of getting vaccinated (even if it is actually free). We learned they’re dominant in states like Mississippi, where they make up 23 percent of the population, which is not surprising due to the state’s high poverty rates and low Medicaid coverage.

Public health experts have stressed the need to bring vaccines to the people; with no group is this truer than for the Cost-Anxious. Holding vaccination clinics in non-health-care locations that people frequent — like workplaces, religious venues, day cares, supermarkets, bars and restaurants — will be critical.

For this group, vaccination campaign leaders should stress that vaccination is totally free and encourage local businesses to provide paid time off for both doses.

System Distrusters : 4 % National average

The System Distrusters believe that the health care system doesn't treat them fairly. Most, but not all, members of this group are people of color, and they prevail in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Georgia.

It will be important for public health officials to hold conversations — formal or informal — with trusted members of their own communities to air concerns and be transparent about efforts to vaccinate underserved communities. People in this group have low expectations that other members of their communities will get vaccinated, so making vaccinations of people they know as visible as possible will be important. Tracking and illuminating efforts to ensure the vaccine rollout is equitable and sharing that with the community is key.

The Watchful: 8 % National average

The Watchful are holding out to see what kind of experience their friends or neighbors have with the vaccine before committing themselves. They dominate in Delaware, making up 17 percent of the state’s population, as well as 12 percent in Hawaii and Rhode Island.

Behavioral science researchers know that establishing norms can lead to acceptance of products and could help persuade the Watchful. Encouraging those who are vaccinated to show their vaccination status with pride, both online and offline, can nudge their family, friends and networks to follow suit. The Watchful are already likely to wear masks, showing an intent to comply with social norms, so they may respond to similar altruistic messages about vaccination and get vaccinated to protect others.

For this group, experts should consider allowing for a “vaccinate later” option. Behavioral science suggests that people prefer moderate or “compromise” options over their extreme counterparts. Being able to opt-in to vaccines down the road may provide a comfortable alternative for this group.

With only 60 percent of U.S. adults having received their first shot, we are still far from President Biden’s target of 70 percent by the Fourth of July. This national average also hides an important truth: The country is a patchwork, with states like Vermont tracking higher (with 78 percent of adults having received their first dose) and states like Mississippi tracking lower (42 percent of adults). Therefore, we can’t rely on a one-size-fits-all approach.

President Biden’s aggressive Fourth of July goal will be tough to meet without understanding what drives lower vaccine confidence and where various strategies to combat it will be most effective. And we can’t stop at the state level; we need to go county by county and ZIP code by ZIP code, offering specific, localized solutions to convince the holdouts. It will also be important that everyone — not just the health care professionals and the politicians — do their part. It won’t be easy, but it must be done to ensure that more people get vaccinated.

Note: The proportion of vaccinated individuals in each state is the proportion of individuals who have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine as of May 5, 2021.

Dr. Sema K. Sgaier is a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Surgo Ventures and an adjunct assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health."

(Rach 3 : You can get the data on your State peer group.IMHO, at least 3 groups have no really good excuse, and , sorry if offending, but even the "not fairly" seems hard to justify this time around.)

[maestrob]

I think we'll make it to 70% countrywide by July 4, but some states, like Mississippi, will lag behind and may face a possible late surge.

Getting young people involved as volunteers would help a great deal in those areas. Democrats have been good at that before.

[Rach3]

From NYT tonight.

" My husband and I are vaccinated, but our small children are still left vulnerable. We are feeling like the new mask guidance from the C.D.C. has left us out in the cold. Those who never wanted to wear masks and those who never wanted a vaccine are the same group. Now, this group is walking around unmasked and putting our children at greater risk. I haven’t felt this scared since the start of the pandemic."

— Adrienne Peterson, Pittsburgh, Pa.

[maestrob]

Quite so.

I've just told one of my younger relatives who so far has refused the vaccine that under no uncertain terms should he come to Manhattan to visit us until he's fully vaccinated, which means he and his fully vaccinated family will now miss my birthday which is coming up next week.

His loss.

[Rach3]

From NYT tonight:

" A new survey finds that unvaccinated Americans are less worried about traveling than vaccinated Americans, CNBC reports."

Probably because the unvaccinated wear masks, right ? DUH !

[Rach3]

Ed Mazza·Overnight Editor, HuffPost
Thu, May 20, 2021, 11:04 PM

Jimmy Kimmel noted on Thursday that searches for fake vaccination cards spiked after federal health experts announced last week that fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks and take part in more activities.

The late-night host called it “so gross” that people are actually buying these fake coronavirus vaccination cards to get the benefits of being vaccinated without actually getting the shots.

“Let’s start calling these vaccine avoiders what they are,” he said. “Freeloaders.”

Then he really went to town:

“The only reason you’re somewhat safe now is because other people got the shot. You’re the person who heads for the bathroom when the check comes at the restaurant. You’re the lady who takes home the centerpieces from a wedding you weren’t invited to. You’re the guy who brings five napkins to a potluck dinner. That’s you.”

“You don’t think it’s you,” he added. “But it’s you.”

[barney]

And that's a great summary. I love the analogies - let everyone else do the work, pay the cost.

Here in Australia, vaccine take-up is slowing down because people want to wait for the Pfizer and not have the Astra-Zeneca (because of the blood-clotting risk). As an over 50, I will hve the A-Z, but I couldn't get in for one with my doctor until June 1. Not so far away now.

[Rach3]

Here in Australia, vaccine take-up is slowing down because people want to wait for the Pfizer and not have the Astra-Zeneca (because of the blood-clotting risk). As an over 50, I will hve the A-Z, but I couldn't get in for one with my doctor until June 1. Not so far away now.

Great news, Barney.I must say I am surprised as my wife and I had our 2 Moderna finished by mid-March. Australia seems to do just about everything better than we here ; except , of course, choosing National government leaders where both countries fail.

[barney]

Well Biden showed what America can do. Once the vaccine roll-out began, it really hit the road running. We mucked it up quite badly from a concatenation of circumstances, which has presented Prime Minister Morrison with quite a political problem. We do seem to be speeding up at last. There's also a lot of complacency as, for the most part, the virus has been held at bay. Ocean borders can be very helpful.

[maestrob]

And that's a great summary. I love the analogies - let everyone else do the work, pay the cost.

Here in Australia, vaccine take-up is slowing down because people want to wait for the Pfizer and not have the Astra-Zeneca (because of the blood-clotting risk). As an over 50, I will hve the A-Z, but I couldn't get in for one with my doctor until June 1. Not so far away now.

Congrats Barney! That's excellent news.

Now if only those Australians stranded around the world can return home soon, all will be well with our friends down under again.

Who knows, maybe it won't take a month to deliver a package by then.

[Rach3]

The 2021 vaccination map looks like the 2020 election map:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics ... index.html

[maestrob]

What worries me is that we are only about 33%college educated. Stupid is as stupid does.

[Rach3]

From NYT Morning newsletter today :

It is common to hear about two different demographic groups that are hesitant to receive a Covid-19 vaccination: Republican voters and racial minorities, especially Black and Latino Americans.

The two groups seem to have different motivations. For Republicans, the attitude is connected to a general skepticism of government and science. For Black and Hispanic Americans, it appears to stem from the country’s legacy of providing substandard medical treatment, and sometimes doing outright harm, to minorities.

These ideas all have some truth to them. But they also can obscure the fact that many unvaccinated Republicans and minorities have something in common: They are working class. And there is a huge class gap in vaccination behavior.

(Here is) a look at vaccination behavior by racial groups and political identification, based on polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Here are) those same groups subdivided by class, using a four-year college degree as the dividing line between working class and professional.

As you can see, working-class members of every group are less likely to have received a vaccine and more likely to be skeptical. “No matter which of these groups we looked at, we see an education divide,” Mollyann Brodie, who oversees the Kaiser surveys, told me. In some cases, different racial groups with the same education levels — like Black and white college graduates — look remarkably similar.

This poll did not break out Asian-Americans, but other Kaiser surveys have, and it’s consistent: Asian-Americans have a higher median income than Black, Hispanic or white Americans and also a higher vaccination rate.

All of which points to the fact that the class divide is bigger than the racial divide.

There are still differences by ethnicity, because racial inequities are a reality of U.S. life. Many Hispanic Americans, across social classes, say either that they want a shot but have not yet received one or that they are waiting to see how the vaccines affect other people. And there are even bigger differences by partisanship, with many Republicans, including professionals, skeptical of the vaccines.

But you can’t understand the country’s struggle to vaccinate everyone — and save thousands of lives — without understanding the class gap.

The ‘coming apart’
The story here is bigger than Covid-19. Last year, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a book called “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” that documented a growing class divide in one area of American life after another.

Income and wealth have grown much more quickly over recent decades for people with a bachelor’s degree than people without one. Marriage, church attendance and self-reported happiness have declined more for the working class than the professional class; chronic pain, obesity and alcohol consumption have increased more. As the title of the book indicates, life expectancy has also diverged, partly because of deaths from alcoholism, drug overdoses and suicide.

“This B.A./non-B.A. divide,” says Deaton, a Nobel laureate, “just comes up again and again and again.”

Case and Deaton, who are Princeton professors, argue that behind these trends is a “coming apart” of the working-class experience. For many people, life lacks the structure, status and meaning that it once had.

Frequently, people are not officially employed by the company where they work, which robs them of the pride that comes from being part of a shared enterprise. They don’t belong to a labor union, either. The timing of their work shifts can change unexpectedly. Many parents are trying to raise children without a partner.

These challenges can interfere with Covid vaccination in multiple ways. Carving out the time — to do the logistical research, get the shot, cope with side effects and schedule a second shot — can be hard. Working-class Americans also have less reason to trust public health officials; if you had suffered the damaging “coming apart” of the past few decades, would you trust people in positions of authority?

After I described the vaccination trends to Case and Deaton, they sent me some broader data on life expectancy, by both race and class. It shows a significant Black-white gap. But that gap has not grown over the past decade. What has grown is the life expectancy gap between college graduates and non-graduates, among both Black and white Americans.

“Though race divisions continue,” Case said, “education is becoming more important relative to race, and perhaps that might be true for vaccinations, too.”

What to do?
The growing class divide in living standards is one of the country’s greatest problems, and it obviously will not be solved before the pandemic ends. But public health experts believe that there are specific strategies that can narrow the vaccination divide.

One is information. About 25 percent of unvaccinated people remain unsure whether somebody who previously had Covid should still get the vaccine, according to Kaiser. The answer is yes: Almost everybody 12 and older should.

Another promising strategy is making shots even more convenient. Employers can help by hosting on-site vaccinations and giving workers paid time off — including the day after the shot for people who experience side effects. Drugstores and supermarkets can accept walk-ins, as some already do. Government officials can send mobile, walk-in clinics into more communities. (Text your ZIP code to 438829 — or text “VACUNA” for Spanish — and you’ll find your local options.)

“We’ve just got to remove all the barriers,” Brodie said.

Finally, friends and relatives can turn a vaccination into something more than just a shot. “Say, ‘Let’s do this together. Let’s do something, so if you get vaccinated, let’s grab dinner after. Let’s celebrate together,’” Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a New York pediatrician, told CNN.

The U.S. is on the verge of victory over Covid. But the disease remains a threat to millions of Americans. The illness and death that occurs in coming months is likely to aggravate the country’s already extreme inequality.

[maestrob]

Good point. I'm in total agreement.

Wish I knew how to reach out to people who are so afraid and misinformed. The psychology of penetrating ignorance is quite beyond my life experience.

Of course their attitude threatens America's recovery and the lives of those around them as well.

Makes me feel quite helpless.

[barney]

What worries me is that we are only about 33%college educated. Stupid is as stupid does.

Not sure that a college education is a help, Brian, when it comes to clear thinking and common sense. I have a degree with first class honours, am 80% through a PhD, currently deferred, and have a doctorate in phiosology, yet everyone who knows me recognises my deficiencies.

Re the doctor of phiosology (you read that correctly), I'll tell you about some other time. My paper paid $300 many years ago for me to get a Liberian doctorate based on "life experience", about which I wrote a feature - but the "university" couldn't spell philosophy. Thus I am probably the world's only Doctor of Phiosology.

[maestrob]

What worries me is that we are only about 33%college educated. Stupid is as stupid does.

Not sure that a college education is a help, Brian, when it comes to clear thinking and common sense. I have a degree with first class honours, am 80% through a PhD, currently deferred, and have a doctorate in phiosology, yet everyone who knows me recognises my deficiencies.

Re the doctor of phiosology (you read that correctly), I'll tell you about some other time. My paper paid $300 many years ago for me to get a Liberian doctorate based on "life experience", about which I wrote a feature - but the "university" couldn't spell philosophy. Thus I am probably the world's only Doctor of Phiosology.

Barney you have had an interesting life, haven't you?

[Rach3]

From NYT today:

"However, the vaccinations may also be masking a much more destructive trend. The Washington Post found that in some parts of the country, the infection rate among unvaccinated people was as high as it was in January near the pandemic’s peak."

[maestrob]

Denial of reality inevitably leads to negative consequences, like death, for example.

[barney]

Indeed. Candidates for the Darwins, perhaps (the stupid ways to die awards).

[Rach3]

"Men Yell At Me " today:

Last September, I sent my kids to school. I couldn’t walk them inside. COVID rules prevented it, so I waved and watched them, masked up and beaming, walk into a world beyond my control.

I live in Iowa, where the governor forced schools to offer 50 percent of core subjects in person. And punished schools that tried to keep students home. In Des Moines, schools opened for online-instruction only in defiance of the governor’s rule. And right now, the superintendent is fighting to keep his administrative license and the school board voted not to renew his contract.

The private school my kids attend stayed open for in-person learning despite the pandemic and an inland hurricane that destroyed the school’s roof and delayed school opening by two weeks. They mandated masks, kept visitors out of the building, kept the kids in pods with their class, never mixing with the other classes and eating lunch in their rooms. It seemed fine, but it had to seem fine. There was nothing else I could do.

Keeping them home wasn’t an option. I am a single parent who negotiates co-parenting with another working parent. So much of my life as a parent has been about keeping them safe. I plugged up outlets, set up baby gates. I kept blankets out of cribs and followed them along playground equipment. Sending my kids to school in a pandemic went against every instinct I had. And yet, what choices did I have? The world was broken, and I was given so few options.

Politicians and policy makers talk a lot about “what’s best for children.” But our ideas of children are often just a palimpsest where we write our own anxieties. The mother of my daughter’s friend, an anti-masker who is also anti-vaccine, says that masks give children stress and anxiety. I have another friend who hasn’t left her home at all, and declares her children too stressed to go into school. I don’t think these parents are wrong. I don’t think they are right. I don’t think I am right. One of the reasons I hated being a child so much was that my life felt like a dance around the live wires of adult expectations, moods, and fears. It truly is so hard for us to see children for who they are.

As a person who is co-parenting with someone who generally disagrees with me, I’ve been at a loss. I wonder if I gave up too quickly on fights that I should have stood my ground for? I wonder if I should have worried less? I wonder if there was ever going to be a right way to raise a child in a global extinction event?

And so here we are, pushing and pulling in a multi-player game of political and cultural tug-o-war and our kids are caught in the middle.

Every school day for this school year, I watched my children’s pink and green backpacks disappear behind the school door into a world of disease and so many unknowns.

This year has been strange. My daughter will come home and tell me about teachers who just “took breaks” for a bit, which kids are missing from which classes, and which parents tested positive. But I have no way of really knowing what is happening inside that building. No one says anything. A teacher at another school told me people are resistant to testing. Because if you test positive, you have to tell people. If you keep quiet, you can just stay home for a few days. Four weeks before the end of the school year, the principal was hospitalized with pneumonia and one class was put into quarantine.

This year, an estimated 40,000 children lost a parent to COVID-19. Over 2 million children have contracted the disease, a number that might be undercounted. Studies show that over half of children who contract COVID-19 have symptoms lasting for longer than 120 days. No one knows how many teachers have died from COVID-19 this year. In fact, COVID-19 and school spread is undercounted and understudied. Sara Anne Willette, who was contracted by the Iowa Teachers Union to track COVID in the schools, told me:

“While the risk for death for kids is low, it is not zero as we have had at least three kids in Iowa die from COVID-19. The CDC looked at school transmission in K-5 institutions in Georgia during the peak surge. They found that schools that had masking saw a 37% reduction in school-related transmission, which was only based on teachers and staff being mandated to mask up. The CDC has made it clear that masking for children is crucial to protecting them from passing the virus to classmates and friends until they are able to be fully vaccinated. It is expected that all school-age kids should be fully vaccinated around Thanksgiving, which means mask mandates will be necessary in the fall to prevent a kid-surge.”

“Children are safe” was one of the first things people believes. Because somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that COVID is a game of numbers rather than an issue of life.

But there are also the children lost by not being in school. Without resources, without meals, without help, they’ve disappeared from the public school system, which has become a de facto social safety net in a country with too few of them. I’m so lucky my kids are in school. I realize that so much of my life and livelihood rely on school as a safety net. I also realize it’s unfair to prop up society on the shoulders of underpaid, overworked teachers, who are themselves at risk.

The grand illusion of America is that we have a country with choices. What pandemic has shown parents is that there are no choices, no good ones anyway.

When a friend calls to ask me if she should send her kids to school when her state opens up, I tell her that every choice is a bad choice. America’s mothers have no help. We have no resources. Our children have no help or resources. Neither do our teachers. It’s just a trickle-down effect of failure.

On May 20, with just a little over a week left of school, I woke up to an email from the school: The governor passed a law that prohibits schools from mandating mask wearing, so they would be complying with her orders.

The law was about freedom, she announced. About choices. Which was ironic coming from a governor who is pushing to amend the state’s constitution to prevent abortions. But here we were. We’d come this far and now and whatever control schools had in protecting kids, who still can’t be vaccinated, was gone.

Dr. Eli Perencevich, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, told me, “Children under 12 years old can’t be vaccinated. All unvaccinated people including children need to wear masks indoors to reduce community transmission until local county infections are at ‘low risk’ levels. Masks are about protecting others. They are about community protection.”

Five days after schools were no longer allowed to enforce mask wearing, Dana James, a nurse practitioner in Iowa, whose methodical approach to data revealed how last fall Iowa’s government was hiding COVID-19 numbers, tweeted that her child had contracted COVID-19. As my small son likes to say, sighing and strapping a mask over his cheeks, “COVID isn’t over, people!”

The morning after the law was passed, I sat with my kids in the car in the drop-off line. I once again explained the risks. I once again explained that this was about protecting the people we love. I once again told them I loved them and that it was hard when adults pulled you back and forth like this. And once again, I watched them put their masks on and walk through the doors of the school.

Twitter avatar for @dlwest07
Dr. Dana Jones
@dlwest07
Five days after you banned mask mandates my baby tested positive for Covid @IAGovernor. You TOOK AWAY all of our choices. All of our protections. One by one. #COVID19

[maestrob]

That made me cringe too many times to count.

Made me think of the madness of lemmings.

This is no longer a question of political philosophy. It's about our very survival as a civilization.

Scientific thought and logical reasoning have gone out the window in Republican states.

It brings me to the verge of despair.

Georgia has just also enacted a law similar to the ones in Florida and Texas that ban businesses and schools from requiring workers and students to be vaccinated.

No consideration for those who are immuno-compromised. A possible death sentence for cancer survivors and organ transplant recipients.

[Rach3]

What a great Country:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/resistance-v ... 43391.html

[maestrob]

Revisit Jacobson in the midst of a pandemic?

We are splitting into two countries, one based on science and the other on magical thinking.

Can the Great Wall be far behind?

[Rach3]

NYT reported today a Tennessee woman was arrested after allegedly driving an SUV recklessly through a vaccination site in protest.

Should be a capital offense.

[Rach3]

From a slightly longer Times op ed today:

“ …Lied to by the president of the United States and egged on by craven commentators, many Americans staunchly refused to give up social gatherings, no matter that staying home was the best way to keep the virus from spreading. They refused to wear masks, and they mocked and harassed people who did. Some are, even now, rejecting a vaccine that could keep the virus from mutating into so many variants that there will be no hope of containing it. And they have done it all, they insist, because they are patriots.

Covid deaths are counted in such inconsistent ways that we may never know their true number, but by one estimate as many as 900,000 Americans have already died of the virus. If you exclude the Civil War, in which Americans fought on both sides, that’s more Americans lost to Covid than in all the other wars we have fought. Combined.

In short, the coronavirus pandemic became a perfect illustration of James’s “moral equivalent of war.” We weren’t fighting a human enemy, but we were fighting for our lives even so. This national calamity, this invasion by a destructive and unstoppable force, was our chance to come together across every possible division. We could finally remember how to sacrifice on behalf of our fellow Americans, how to mourn together the unfathomable losses — not just of life but of security, camaraderie, the capacity for hope.

Plenty of Americans — essential workers, first responders, hospital staff, teachers and many others — lost their lives because they made such sacrifices. Millions more complied unhesitatingly with measures designed to keep the most vulnerable among us safe. But too, too many of us did not. Too many were hostile to the very idea that they should alter their behavior even in the smallest way for the sake of strangers.

But for those “patriots,” we might be able now to imagine the proclamation of another kind of Memorial Day, one that commemorates not self-sacrifice in war but the lives we saved by joining together to serve the same cause.

If Vietnam exploded the unquestioned commitment to national service, the coronavirus pandemic should have been the very thing to bring it back.That it did exactly the opposite tells us something about who we are as human beings, and who we are as a nation. There is more to mourn today than I ever understood before.”

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the books “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss” and the forthcoming “Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/opin ... 693bc7595b

[maestrob]

That last paragraph that you underlined really hits the nail on the head.

Today I mourn our nearly 600,000 dead as well as our Veterans. So much of this terrible loss could have been prevented if we had been led properly.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

From WAPO today:

President Biden's goal of getting at least one vaccine dose into 70 percent of adults by July 4 is at risk as the U.S. averages about 1 million shots per day. That total has declined by more than two-thirds from its peak of 3.4 million doses in April, with the slowdown particularly apparent in the South and the Midwest, according to a Washington Post analysis. Groups of health-care workers and volunteers outnumber vaccine seekers at many immunization sites across the country.

Former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies are trying with renewed energy to villainize top federal infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci and acclaim Trump for what they characterize as his underappreciated attempts to fight the coronavirus while in office. Their efforts have centered on the virus's origin and the early response in the U.S. Trump plans to make the coronavirus a primary argument in his effort to rehabilitate his reputation, while Republicans attempt to make it a centerpiece of their midterm election campaigns.

[Rach3]

NYT June 8 :

State health officials are growing increasingly concerned about whether doses of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine may expire this month, warning they could go to waste if they go unused in the coming weeks or are not sent elsewhere.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio has pleaded with health providers in his state to use about 200,000 doses of the vaccine that he said on Monday were set to expire on June 23. The state’s health department directed providers to adopt a “first-in, first-out” process for the shot to ensure doses with earlier expiration dates were used first. Arkansas’ state epidemiologist said last week that as many as 60,000 doses of Johnson & Johnson may not be used there in time.

Dr. Marcus Plescia, who represents state health agencies as the chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said he believed the expiration risk for Johnson & Johnson was a problem in every state. Over 10 million doses of the vaccine have been delivered to states but not administered, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Andy Slavitt, a White House pandemic adviser, said on Tuesday at a news conference that the federal government was encouraging governors to consult with the Food and Drug Administration on storage procedures as the agency examines how to possibly extend the shelf life of the vaccine. He said the agency was “looking at opportunities for continued storage.”

An F.D.A. spokeswoman on Tuesday referred questions about the vaccine’s shelf life to Johnson & Johnson.

“We continue to work with the U.S. government and health authorities to support the use of our vaccine, which continues to play an important role, including among those who wish to be fully vaccinated with one shot,” the company said in a statement. “We also continue to conduct stability testing with the goal of extending the amount of time our Covid-19 vaccine can be stored before expiry.”

The single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine can be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures for three months, conditions that have allowed states to reach more isolated communities that may find it more difficult to manage the two-dose vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have stricter storage requirements. Pfizer’s vaccine expires six months from its manufacture date.

Concerns among state health officials about the Johnson & Johnson doses have dovetailed with a significant drop in vaccination rates across the nation. As of Monday, providers were administering about 1.13 million doses per day on average, a 67 percent decrease from the peak of 3.38 million reported on April 13. About 64 percent of adults have received at least one shot, according to federal data.

[maestrob]

In the U.S., hospitalizations are rising in areas with low vaccination rates.

The coronavirus might be receding in much of the United States, but it continues to spread in communities with low Covid-19 vaccination rates, where highly contagious virus variants pose a threat to those who have not had shots.

In Smith County, Tenn., where only 20 percent of people are fully vaccinated, there has been an almost 700 percent increase in hospitalizations for Covid-19 over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database. In Trousdale, Tenn., where only 23 percent of people have had two vaccine doses, hospitalizations have also surged by 700 percent in the same period.

The increase is not a coincidence, said Dr. Ted Delbridge, executive director of the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems. People who become ill with Covid-19 now are, “in most age groups, twice as likely to end up hospitalized as people who got the virus earlier in the course of the pandemic,” Dr. Delbridge said.

In Maryland, of those between the ages of 50 and 59 who contracted Covid-19 over the winter, about 8 percent were hospitalized, he said. From the end of April through the beginning of June, the hospitalization rate in that group was 19 percent.

Dangerous virus variants are likely to be to blame, Dr. Delbridge said. The variant first found in Britain, now known as Alpha, is deadlier and more contagious than most others and is now dominant in the United States. Last month, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the variant, also known as B.1.1.7, made up 72 percent of U.S. cases at the time.

But vaccines have proven to be effective against the Alpha variant. A spring surge that scientists had warned of largely failed to materialize in the United States.

“I think we got lucky, to be honest,” Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at Yale University, told The New York Times last month. “We’re being rescued by the vaccine.”

Through Tuesday, about 172 million Americans had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to a Times database. But vaccine distribution across the country has slowed in recent weeks. About 1 million shots are being administered nationwide each day, down from an April peak of 3 million.

In Michigan, one of the few states that saw a surge in cases this spring, Alpha struck younger people who were returning to schools and playing contact sports.

“Because it’s more transmissible, the virus finds cracks in behavior that normally wouldn’t have been as much of a problem,” said Emily Martin, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.

At a White House press briefing on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief Covid adviser, said the Delta variant, which was originally identified in India, was emerging as the dominant variant in Britain.

“We cannot let that happen in the United States,” Dr. Fauci said, adding that the Delta variant now accounted for 6 percent of sequenced cases in the United States.

Dr. Fauci urged young people to get vaccinated, citing a study that found that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine or the AstraZeneca vaccine appeared to be effective against the Delta variant.

One way of limiting the spread is for those who are vaccinated to wear masks around those who are not, doctors say. At least one state is making that a rule in some places: When California reopens next week, fully vaccinated colleagues working in a room together will be allowed to work maskless. But if one person is unvaccinated, everyone in the room will need to wear a mask.

“If I’m in close proximity to other people, and I don’t know their vaccination status, I put a mask on,” Dr. Delbridge said. “It’s just too easy.”

— Jesus Jiménez

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/09 ... virus-mask

[maestrob]

Cruise lines want to sail out of Florida, but a vaccine passport ban stands in the way.

Cruise lines are starting to make plans to sail this summer out of Florida, which one company called “the cruise capital of the world.” But the state’s ban on vaccine passports complicates how ships can navigate its ports.

Some cruise lines, such as Norwegian Cruise Line, plan to sail with fully vaccinated crews and ensure that guests are also fully vaccinated. But while the federal government says employers can make on-site employees get vaccinated, a Florida state law prohibits businesses from requiring a vaccine passport, or proof of Covid-19 vaccination, in exchange for services.

The law has local officials concerned that their cities lose out if cruise lines decide to skip Florida ports, as Frank Del Rio, chief executive of Norwegian Cruise Line, recently threatened to do as a last resort.

On Monday, the company announced that it planned to set sail this summer from New York, Los Angeles and two Florida cities, Port Canaveral and Miami. The cruise line, however, did not specify how it planned to sail out of Florida.

Mr. Del Rio said the company was in contact with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s staff and legal team to “ensure that we can offer the safest cruise experience for our passengers departing from the cruise capital of the world.”

Other cruise lines, such as Royal Caribbean International, might bow to the state’s vaccine passport ban. Announcing its voyage plans out of Miami this summer, the cruise line said that its crews would be fully vaccinated, while guests were “strongly recommended to set sail fully vaccinated, if they are eligible.”

Royal Caribbean guests who are not vaccinated — or unable to prove that they are — will have to be tested for the virus, and could be subject to other protocols to be announced later, the cruise line said.

Last week, the mayors of Broward County, Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood sent a letter to Governor DeSantis urging him to reconsider the state’s position on vaccine passports. They argued that the cruise lines “are ready to set sail” based on U.S. Centers for Disease Control guidelines, but that the ban on vaccine passports prevented them from doing so.

“We are extremely concerned that unless a resolution can be reached, this impasse over the rules will result in the loss of the cruise industry in Broward County and Florida overall,” the mayors wrote.

— Jesus Jiménez

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/09 ... virus-mask

[maestrob]

Wisconsin Pharmacist Who Tampered With Vaccine Gets 3-Year Sentence

The pharmacist, Steven R. Brandenburg, believed in conspiracy theories and thought vaccines were dangerous, the authorities said.

By Azi Paybarah
June 8, 2021

A hospital pharmacist who pleaded guilty to trying to spoil more than 500 doses of a Covid-19 vaccine was sentenced on Tuesday to three years in prison, federal prosecutors in Wisconsin announced.

The pharmacist, Steven R. Brandenburg, 46, was also sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay nearly $84,000 in restitution to the Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wis., where he worked an overnight shift.

Mr. Brandenburg was “an admitted conspiracy theorist” who believed the vaccine could harm people and “change their DNA,” according to the police in Grafton, Wis. In January, he pleaded guilty to two counts of attempting to tamper with a consumer product in a way that could injure or kill someone, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Wisconsin.


During Mr. Brandenburg’s shifts on Dec. 24 and Dec. 25, he removed a box of vials of the Moderna vaccine from a refrigerator in the pharmacy for “periods of multiple hours, intending to render that same vaccine inert or ineffective,” according to the plea agreement, which includes a description of Mr. Brandenburg’s activity based on an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Grafton Police Department.

On Dec. 26, the vials, which contained 570 doses of the vaccine, were discovered sitting outside their refrigerator. That day, 57 people received doses of the vaccine from the batch Mr. Brandenburg had attempted to spoil, according to the plea agreement. Five days after the misplaced vials were discovered, Mr. Brandenburg was arrested.

In a sentencing memo, prosecutors sought to persuade the judge to issue a longer sentence for Mr. Brandenburg, arguing that his behavior had tangible consequences for the people who received the doses that had been left unrefrigerated.

Though “it currently appears that the vaccine received by these 57 people remained effective — despite the defendant’s best efforts — the harms he caused were multifaceted and severe,” Richard G. Frohling, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, wrote in the memo.

One victim, a medical professional, expressed “lasting worry and stress” about what Mr. Brandenburg had done, and suffered an inability to focus on daily tasks, according to the memo. Another victim, a doctor, told of experiencing “fear,” “anxiety, “dread” and “significant anguish” that lasted “many weeks,” it said.

The prosecutor’s memo also described Mr. Brandenburg as a medical professional with a decade of experience who also believed in a host of conspiracy theories. “He believed that the authorities were ‘out to get him’; that Judgment Day was imminent; that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were ‘fake’; that the Earth was flat; that he was a ‘prophet’; and that vaccines were ‘of the Devil,’” Mr. Frohling wrote in the memo. He also wrote that Mr. Brandenburg believed the vaccine from Moderna was “microchipped” and would make recipients infertile.

At the sentencing in U.S. District Court on Tuesday, Judge Brett H. Ludwig said he was handing down a lighter sentence because Mr. Brandenburg had no previous criminal record and had accepted responsibility for his actions and because no physical harm had come from the tampering, The Associated Press reported. At the sentencing, Mr. Brandenburg said he felt “great shame” for what he had done and apologized to his co-workers, his family and the people of Grafton, The A.P. reported.

Jason D. Baltz, a lawyer for Mr. Brandenburg, declined to comment on the sentencing.

Mr. Frohling said, “Ensuring access to safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines is critical to the well-being of everyone in our communities.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/us/s ... e=Homepage

[maestrob]

The F.D.A. tells Johnson & Johnson that about 60 million doses made at troubled plant cannot be used.

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators have told Johnson & Johnson that about 60 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine produced at a troubled Baltimore factory cannot be used because of possible contamination, according to people familiar with the situation.

The Food and Drug Administration plans to allow about 10 million doses to be distributed in the United States or sent to other countries, but with a warning that regulators cannot guarantee that Emergent BioSolutions, the company that operates the plant, followed good manufacturing practices.

The agency has not yet decided whether Emergent can reopen the factory, which has been closed for two months because of regulatory concerns, the people said.

The Johnson & Johnson doses administered in the United States so far were manufactured at the firm’s plant in the Netherlands, not by Emergent. For weeks the F.D.A. has been trying to figure out what to do about at least 170 million doses of vaccine that were left in limbo after the discovery of a major production mishap involving two vaccines manufactured at the Baltimore factory.

More than 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson and at least 70 million doses of AstraZeneca were put on hold after Emergent discovered in March that its workers had contaminated a batch of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine with a key ingredient used to produce AstraZeneca’s. Federal officials then ordered the plant to pause production, stripped Emergent of its responsibility to produce AstraZeneca’s vaccine and instructed Johnson & Johnson to assert direct control over the manufacturing of its vaccine there.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was once considered a potential game-changer in the nation’s vaccine stock because it required only one shot and was particularly useful in vulnerable communities. But the federal government now has an ample supply of the vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the two other federally authorized vaccine developers, and no longer needs Johnson & Johnson’s supply.
Still, the loss of 60 million Johnson & Johnson doses puts a dent in the Biden administration’s plan to distribute vaccines to other countries that are still in the grip of the pandemic. The administration had been counting on sharing doses of both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca but had to delay its plan while the F.D.A. completed a review of the facility.

After he arrived in Britain for the Group of 7 summit this week, President Biden announced he had found another source for donations. Pfizer-BioNTech has now agreed to sell his administration 500 million doses at cost for donation to low and lower-middle income countries over the next year. The World Health Organization estimates that 11 billion doses are needed globally to stamp out the epidemic.

The F.D.A.’s action is disappointing news for Emergent and Johnson & Johnson, which hired the firm as a subcontractor. Inspectors are still reviewing the plant and are not expected to decide whether the company can reopen it until later this month, according to people familiar with the situation. Regulators are also continuing to cast doubt on whether the company, which has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the federal government to manufacture coronavirus vaccines, adhered to manufacturing standards.

The agency’s plan to allow 10 million doses to be used in the United States or abroad with a warning is somewhat unusual for a product under emergency authorization, experts said. Regulators have the discretion to take that action if the drugs are badly needed and in short supply, they said.

In a statement, the F.D.A. said that before making its decision, it “conducted a thorough review of facility records and the results of quality testing performed by the manufacturer.” It also considered the ongoing public health emergency. The agency said it was continuing to “work through issues” at the Baltimore plant with Johnson & Johnson and Emergent.
Dr. Peter Marks, the F.D.A.’s top vaccine regulator, said in the statement that the agency has been conducting an extensive review of batches of vaccine produced at the plant “while Emergent BioSolutions prepares to resume manufacturing operations with corrective actions to ensure compliance with the F.D.A.’s current good manufacturing practice requirements.”

Representatives from Johnson & Johnson and Emergent declined to comment on the agency’s decision.

— Sharon LaFraniere, Noah Weiland and Sheryl Gay Stolberg

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/11 ... virus-mask

[Rach3]

Deep Red Hawley-Ville , one of the top virus hotspots. The " Show Me " state has been shown to be....

NYT 6/17:

A tourist-friendly section of Missouri has emerged as a worsening hot spot for the coronavirus.

The number of Covid hospitalizations in Missouri’s southwestern region has nearly doubled in a few weeks. On Wednesday, the state health department reported over 200 hospitalizations in the state’s southwestern region alone, a figure that was just over 100 at the end of last month.

As of Wednesday, the state’s daily average of hospitalizations had risen to 726. With hot spots in some northern counties as well, Missouri ranks second among U.S. states for the highest number of coronavirus cases per capita.


Dr. Hilary Babcock, a Washington University infectious disease specialist at BJC Healthcare in St. Louis, said that the rise in cases in southwestern Missouri was not surprising. “These are areas that are rural, more conservative and are less welcoming to vaccines,” Dr. Babcock said.

Branson, billed as the state’s entertainment capital, falls in Taney and Stone counties, which have vaccine rates of 27.97 and 28.7 percent. Miller County, which houses Lake of the Ozarks, a popular recreation area, has a vaccine rate of 23.4 percent.

These rates are almost half the state average of 43 percent, which is still behind the national average. Some 53 percent of Americans have received at least one dose.

“We’re getting into a narrative about two populations,” said Dr. Babcock. “One that is still pretty safe and less likely to get sick, even if infected, and another that remains very vulnerable, and are unfortunately less interested in taking what is an American-made, and very successful, vaccine to protect themselves against this global virus spread.”

State health authorities are closely monitoring the spread of variants in Missouri, and have urged more people to get vaccinated. On Wednesday, the Missouri Department of Health issued a warning about the Delta variant, which was first identified in India.

“With this variant being easier to spread and possibly causing more severe illnesses among unvaccinated people of all ages, vaccinations are the best way to stop this virus in its tracks,” said Robert Knodell, its acting director.

According to estimates that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention composes based on genomic sequencing, 6.8 percent of the cases in Missouri involve Delta, a relatively high percentage in the United States. The C.D.C. estimates also show the state has a slightly smaller but also relatively high prevalence of the Gamma variant, first identified in Brazil, which carries some mutations that may help it evade immunity protections.

The case surge accompanying the crowds visiting southwestern Missouri mirror what the state saw last year, when residents ignored social distancing guidelines to congregate near the Lake of the Ozarks on Memorial Day weekend. But similar surges in the northern part of the state suggest that the lack of significant restrictions may be playing a role.

Missouri has relied on localities to manage their own areas, and many have lifted any requirements for masks or social distancing. Kansas City, for instance, removed its mask requirements at the beginning of May.

The spread in northeastern Missouri, Dr. Babcock said, “is related to school outbreaks — but what these places all have in common is a rapid relaxation of restrictions.”

Dr. Babcock says that the state’s situation offers a warning of what could happen elsewhere.

“These places all felt pretty comfortable and safe a month or two ago, and now they’re not,” she said. “That could be any of us.”

[maestrob]

It's really shameful, isn't it?

In New York State, we are now 70% vaccinated with one dose, and 52% are fully vaccinated, compared to Missouri's 37%.

Here in Manhattan, we felt quite safe celebrating our 39th anniversary in a restaurant in Columbus Center, while Republican states are having a serious uptick in cases.

People don't know what to believe anymore. The vast right-wing conspiracy that Hillary constantly warned about beginning during Bill's presidency has metastacized into TuKKKer Carlson's Fox News insanity that's now claiming that the FBI instigated the January 6 insurrection.

You can't make this up!

[maestrob]

High Hopes for Johnson & Johnson’s Covid Vaccine Have Fizzled in the U.S.

Production problems and a brief pause on its use kept the one-dose vaccine from becoming the game changer that health officials across the country believed it would be.


By Noah Weiland
June 18, 2021
Updated 9:02 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — When Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine was authorized for emergency use in late February, ​it was seen as a breakthrough for reaching vulnerable and isolated Americans, a crucial alternative to vaccines that require two shots weeks apart and fussier storage. It was soon popular on college campuses, in door-to-door campaigns and with harder-to-reach communities that often struggle with access to health care.

But with only 11.8 million doses administered in the United States so far — less than 4 percent of the total — the “one and done” vaccine has fallen flat. States have warned for weeks that they may not find recipients for millions of doses that will soon expire, partly because the vaccine’s appeal dropped after it was linked to a rare but serious blood-clotting disorder and injections were paused for 10 days in April.

The vaccine took another hit last week, when regulators told Johnson & Johnson that it should throw out tens of millions of additional doses produced at a plant in Baltimore because they might be contaminated. The diminished supply and enthusiasm for the shot mean that its role in the United States is fading fast, even though millions of Americans have yet to be vaccinated.

“It’s just not what I think anybody would have hoped it would be when it came out,” said Dave Baden, the chief financial officer of the Oregon Health Authority.

Health officials in a number of other states presented a similarly discouraging picture. The pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, they said, effectively kicked it aside for good; only about 3.5 million doses have been used since the pause was lifted on April 23. Kim Deti, a spokeswoman for the Wyoming Health Department, said the graph of uptake in her state told the vaccine’s story: a significant climb in the early weeks of its rollout, followed by a plateau that began around the pause.

State officials had initially hoped the Johnson & Johnson shot would be a workhorse: a versatile, easy-to-store tool they could stockpile at mass vaccination sites, quickly reaching thousands of people they would not need to track down for a second dose. But after demand dropped, their goals grew more modest.

It is being used in a smaller-bore fashion this week at the Fiesta festival in San Antonio, the College World Series in Omaha, a Juneteenth celebration in Johnstown, Pa., and an aquarium in Long Beach, Calif. At a food bank in Reno, Nev., 12 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine were administered on Thursday, said Jocelyn Lantrip, the director of marketing and communications for the Food Bank of Northern Nevada.


Between the small number of doses distributed and the lack of interest in them, public health experts say, the United States missed a critical opportunity to address health disparities with a vaccine that should have been ideal for reaching vulnerable populations. Dr. Chip Riggins, a regional medical director who oversees vaccine events in south central Louisiana, said that few organizers requested the shot anymore, even in a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

“In the early days of J&J, working with the African American community and the churches, the faith community here, it was a very, very popular option,” Dr. Riggins said. “It pains me that it isn’t being accepted like it was before the pause.”

Dr. José R. Romero, the Arkansas health secretary, called the shot’s fast decline a “lost opportunity” for reaching the vulnerable in his state.

“This is a vaccine that was very well-suited for populations where we have problems getting into,” he said. “We’re now at the point where it’s five people or three people; it doesn’t matter, we’ll open a vial.”

Dr. Riggins said he had limited success in recent months sending the vaccine to churches, casinos and even gas stations, including one in LaPlace, La., where organizers offered the shot on Thursday. An international crew on a ship was elated to receive their shots last weekend, Dr. Riggins said. But not being able to fully protect more people with just a single dose, he added, was hindering the state’s progress.


Johnson & Johnson’s decline in the United States has dovetailed with decreasing demand for Covid vaccines overall. Nearly 30 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are sitting unused, as are about 25 million of Moderna’s. But a total of 135 million people have been fully immunized with those vaccines, 11 times more than with Johnson & Johnson’s. The two-dose vaccines have a higher efficacy rate overall — roughly 95 percent versus 72 percent for Johnson & Johnson’s — but studies showed that all three were highly effective at preventing hospitalization and death.

Alex Gorsky, Johnson & Johnson’s chief executive, said last week that he was still hopeful that the vaccine, which has been used in 26 countries so far, would help contain the pandemic overseas. The company has promised up to 400 million doses to the African Union. Separately, Covax, the global vaccine-sharing program, is supposed to receive hundreds of millions of doses.

“We still believe that this is going to be a very important tool in the overall armamentarium,” Mr. Gorsky said at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal.

But manufacturing problems at a factory in Baltimore run by Emergent BioSolutions, Johnson & Johnson’s subcontractor, have had serious consequences for the vaccine. Because of a major production mishap that resulted in a two-month shutdown in operations, Johnson & Johnson has essentially been forced to sit out the brunt of the pandemic in the United States while Pfizer and Moderna, the other federally authorized vaccine makers, provided almost all the nation’s vaccine stock.

Johnson & Johnson has had to throw out the equivalent of 75 million doses, and the regulatory authorities in Canada, South Africa and the European Union also decided to pull back millions more doses made at the Baltimore plant. The company has been able to deliver less than half of the 100 million doses it promised the federal government by the end of this month.

Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, said that in her state, Johnson & Johnson’s shot had become a victim of its own timing. By late February, when it was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, Alaska had figured out how to get two-dose vaccines to remote areas, leaving the one-shot regimen less crucial than she had initially imagined.

Dr. Clay Marsh, West Virginia’s Covid-19 czar, said that the pause and Johnson & Johnson’s later authorization — more than two months after Pfizer’s and Moderna’s — deprived it of a “halo effect.” By the time West Virginia had an ample supply of all three vaccines, he said, “people started to get this concept that maybe there’s something better about being immunized with Pfizer and Moderna.”

The Johnson & Johnson shot had also suffered from a “social network effect,” said Andrew C. Anderson, a professor of public health at Tulane University who researches vaccine hesitancy. Most Americans who were inoculated in the early months of the vaccine campaign received Moderna and Pfizer shots, and so their friends and family were less likely to deviate and accept a different brand.

In Louisiana, hospitals in the New Orleans area have started offering the Johnson & Johnson shot to people on their way out of the emergency room; the thinking is that people will be more likely to accept the vaccine when a doctor who has treated them asks them to take it. And in Arkansas, where only a third of the population is fully vaccinated, state officials are offering Johnson & Johnson doses to agriculture, manufacturing, wastewater and poultry workers, with gift certificates for hunting and fishing licenses as a reward.


“I don’t think that the book on J&J is closed,” said Dr. Joseph Kanter, Louisiana’s top health official. “It’s just not going to be a game changer.”

In West Virginia, officials are now hoping to use up some 20,000 doses of the shot at summer fairs and festivals and in parks, Dr. Marsh said. And in Oregon, Mr. Baden, the state health authority official, said that providers were working to exhaust about 150,000 doses in correctional facilities and higher-throughput sites in Portland. The sharp drop in interest, he said, was “tragic.”

Onisis Stefas, the chief pharmacy officer at Northwell Health, New York State’s largest health care provider, said he was still working through the system’s original allocation of Johnson & Johnson from March — a sign that demand had shriveled long ago. Doctors’ offices have asked for as few as 10 doses at a time instead of the pack of 50 the vaccine typically comes in.

In Michigan, where more than 200,000 Johnson & Johnson doses sit unused, officials are racing to redistribute the vaccine to high-volume sites in hopes of administering them before they expire.

“It’s just kind of one after another negative news about the vaccine,” said Dr. Joneigh S. Khaldun, the chief medical executive in the state.

Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/us/p ... e=Homepage

[maestrob]

With Vaccination Goal in Doubt, Biden Warns of Variant’s Threat

Speaking at the White House, the president did not mention his goal of getting 70 percent of adults partly vaccinated by July 4 but trumpeted a different milestone: 300 million shots in his first 150 days in office.


By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Noah Weiland
June 18, 2021

WASHINGTON — With the United States unlikely to reach his self-imposed deadline of having 70 percent of adults partly vaccinated against the coronavirus by July 4, President Biden on Friday stepped up his drive for Americans to get their shots, warning that those who decline risk becoming infected by a highly contagious and potentially deadly variant.

In an afternoon appearance at the White House, Mr. Biden avoided mentioning the 70 percent target that he set in early May and instead trumpeted a different milestone: 300 million shots in his first 150 days in office. But even as he hailed the vaccination campaign’s success, he sounded a somber note about the worrisome Delta variant, which is spreading in states with low vaccination rates.

“The best way to protect yourself against these variants is to get vaccinated,” the president declared.

His remarks came as his administration begins a final push to reach the July 4 goal over the next two weeks. Vice President Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra, the health and human services secretary, were both on the road on Friday, trying to drum up enthusiasm for the vaccine. Ms. Harris went to Atlanta, where she noted that less than half of people in Fulton County, where the city is, had at least one shot, and Mr. Becerra to Colorado.

Mr. Biden took office in January warning of a “dark winter” ahead, as deaths were near peak levels and vaccinations were barely underway, and he has generally tried to portray the virus as in retreat as he approaches six months in office.

A fact sheet distributed by the White House in advance of Friday’s remarks noted that in 15 states and the District of Columbia, 70 percent of adults or more have received at least one shot. “The results are clear: America is starting to look like America again, and entering a summer of joy and freedom,” the document proclaimed.

But rates of vaccination, and of infection, are uneven around the country.

And while those who took a “wait and see” attitude are becoming more open to getting vaccinated, 20 percent of American adults still say they will definitely not get the vaccine or will get vaccinated only if it is required, according to a poll released last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

State health officials are trying to persuade the hesitant. In West Virginia, where just over a third of the population is fully vaccinated, Dr. Clay Marsh, the state’s coronavirus czar, said young people were proving especially difficult to win over.

“There was a narrative earlier in the pandemic that is really haunting us, which is that young people are really protected,” he said. “There’s a false belief that for many young people who are otherwise healthy that they still have a relatively free ride with this, and if they get infected, they’ll be fine.”

In Louisiana, where just 34 percent of the population is fully vaccinated and only 37 percent have at least a single dose, state officials announced on Thursday a new lottery for anyone in the state who had received one dose, with a grand prize of $1 million.

And in Wyoming, with vaccination rates almost identical to Louisiana’s, Kim Deti, a health department spokeswoman, said that “politicization is a concern” as officials seek to increase the number of people inoculated. But she said there were also other reasons for slowing rates in her state.

“We’ve had relatively low levels of Covid-19 illnesses statewide for a while now, which affects threat perception,” Ms. Deti wrote in an email. “With schools open all through the school year and most businesses open most of the past year, it has likely been harder for some people to see the personal need for vaccination.”

Speaking to students at a vaccination mobilization event at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia on Friday, Ms. Harris warned of the dangers of misinformation and framed the decision to get vaccinated as a way to take power back from the virus.

“Let’s arm ourselves with the truth,” she said. “When people say it seems like this vaccine came about overnight — no, it didn’t. It’s the result of many many years of research.”

When Mr. Biden set the July 4 goal in early May, he said meeting it would demonstrate that the United States had taken “a serious step toward a return to normal,” and for many people, that already seems to be the case. This week, California and New York lifted virtually all of their pandemic restrictions on businesses and social gatherings.

But the time frame is tight. An analysis by The New York Times shows that, if the rate of adult vaccinations continues on the seven-day average, the country will fall just short of Mr. Biden’s 70 percent goal, with 67.6 percent of American adults having had at least one shot by July 4.


As of Friday, 65 percent of adults have had at least one shot, according to data from the C.D.C. But the number of Americans getting their first shot has been dropping steadily, to about 200,000 a day from about 500,000 a day since Mr. Biden announced that June would be a “month of action” to reach his goal.

“I don’t see an intervention that could really bring back an exponential increase in demand to get the kind of numbers that we probably need to get to 70 percent,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health officials.

Experts say that from a disease control perspective, the difference between 67 percent and 70 percent is insignificant. But from a political perspective, it would be the first time Mr. Biden has set a pandemic-related goal that he has not met. He has continually set relatively modest targets for himself and exceeded them, including his pledge to get 100 million shots in the arms of Americans by his 100th day in office.

“The 70 percent target is not a hard and fast number; not hitting it exactly does not mean the sky is falling,” said Jen Kates, the director of global health and H.I.V. policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “On the other hand, it has symbolic importance. There has been a lot of emphasis on getting to that point and not hitting it is a reminder of how difficult the remaining stretch is going to be.”

In the White House, aides to Mr. Biden now say they are less concerned with reaching the 70 percent target than with having the nation feel the sense of normalcy that the president promised. Only a few months ago, they noted, he spoke of small family barbecues on July 4, whereas now big gatherings are possible.

To prove the point, the White House is also planning a big July 4 celebration of “independence from the virus,” with fireworks on the National Mall here in Washington and a gathering of more than 1,000 military personnel and essential workers joining Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris and their spouses to watch the festivities from the South Lawn.

In announcing the 70 percent target, on May 4, Mr. Biden made a personal plea to all of the unvaccinated: “This is your choice. It’s life and death.”

A month later, in early June, he tried to rally the nation by declaring a “month of action,” and proposing incentives, including an offer of free child care for parents and caregivers while they receive their shots. He also promised a national canvassing effort resembling a get-out-the-vote drive.

Since then, White House officials say, nonprofits and community groups around the country have been holding testing and vaccination events, particularly in Black churches. Planned Parenthood has invested in paid phone banking and the Service Employees International Union has joined with the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials to host vaccination clinics and canvassing events.

Asked about the July 4 deadline this week, Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, avoided saying specifically that the nation would reach the 70 percent threshold by that date.

“We’ve made tremendous progress,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of people are continuing to get their first shots each day, and we’re going to get to 70 percent, and we’re going to continue across the summer months to push beyond 70 percent.”

Annie Karni contributed reporting from Washington, and Amy Schoenfeld Walker from Trumbull, Conn.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a Washington Correspondent covering health policy. In more than two decades at The Times, she has also covered the White House, Congress and national politics. Previously, at The Los Angeles Times, she shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by that newspaper’s Metro staff.

Noah Weiland is a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering health care. He was raised in East Lansing, Mich., and graduated from the University of Chicago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/us/p ... e=Homepage

[Rach3]

" What , Me Get Vaccinated ?! "

MAD if you dont.

https://www.axios.com/cdc-adult-coronav ... stream=top

[maestrob]

" What, Me Get Vaccinated ?! "

MAD if you don't.

https://www.axios.com/cdc-adult-coronav ... stream=top

"Every adult death from Covid is now completely preventable."

Absolutely.

[Rach3]

From WAPO's Coronavirus Newsletter tonight:

Health experts and federal officials are worried the rise in cases caused by the delta variant could further divide those who are vaccinated from those who are not, placing the unprotected at greater risk because this variant is more contagious. Delta "has come out of nowhere,” University of Nevada at Reno geneticist Mark Pandori told The Post. “It seems to be a very successful variant and is closing in on the number one spot.”

Before the fall semester begins, colleges across the country are trying to make sure as many students as possible get vaccinated. Those schools fall, broadly, into two camps. Some colleges and universities have made vaccines a condition to return to campus. Others have less strict policies, instead encouraging students to get immunized without a mandate.

The mandatory approach to vaccines for university students has already sparked resistance: Eight Indiana University students filed a lawsuit against the college on Monday. They argued the requirement to get vaccinated violated the law. A university spokesman said the school was “confident it will prevail in this case” and that the rule will enable a safe return to campus.

Houston Methodist became one of the first health-care systems in the United States to mandate its workers get vaccinated. Some employees refused. A nurse who would not get vaccinated sued the hospital, but a federal district court judge dismissed the lawsuit. Now, more than 150 people at the Texas hospital have resigned or have been fired because they did not get a coronavirus vaccine.

Your questions, answered:

“A recent statistic from Great Britain showed that 29 percent of those who were hospitalized and died from the delta variant had received a full course (two doses) of the vaccine. Why are American public health officials not more concerned? Everyone is saying very generally that the vaccinated are protected. Are we sure?” —Laura in Maryland

Even several weeks ago, the delta coronavirus variant, which has taken over as the dominant strain in the United Kingdom, accounted for a small number of cases of covid-19 in the United States. But as the variant — also known as B.1.617.2 — quickly gains ground here, U.S. health authorities are expressing growing concern.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has upgraded the delta variant to a “variant of concern,” and CDC director Rochelle Walensky recently said the variant may soon become dominant in the United States.

"When these viruses mutate, they do so with some advantage to the virus. In this case, it is more transmissible," she said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.” "It's more transmissible than the alpha variant, or the U.K. variant, that we have here. We saw that quickly become the dominant strain in a period of one or two months, and I anticipate that is going to be what happens with the delta strain here."

Walensky said the CDC is concerned because as the variant mutates, it could start evading available vaccines. “That's really what we're actively trying to prevent, which is why we're really encouraging people to get vaccinated," she said.

As it stands, more than 150 million people in the United States have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Research from Public Health England showed the vaccines, particularly Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca, were 33 percent effective against symptomatic infection from the delta variant after one dose. But after the second dose, Pfizer, an mRNA vaccine, was 88 percent effective and AstraZeneca, an adenovirus-vectored vaccine, was 60 percent effective. And the shots appear to be just as powerful at preventing hospitalizations from the delta variant as they are at preventing hospitalizations from other variants.

"I will say, as worrisome as this delta strain is with regard to its hyper-transmissibility, our vaccines work,” Walensky said on “Good Morning America.”

So to answer your question, yes the delta variant is more contagious, more likely to cause severe illness and shows moderate signs of resistance to post-infection and post-vaccination immunity.

But in the British study you referenced, the 42 deaths were among more than 33,000 people who contracted the delta variant, and only about 8 percent of that total number were fully vaccinated.

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said that the vaccine does provide protection against the variant. It’s just that when millions and millions of people are vaccinated — many of whom are older with preexisting health conditions — “you are bound to have breakthroughs and you will see a few hospitalizations and deaths,” he said.

He said people should still “be careful” — by getting vaccinated and continuing to wear masks.

[maestrob]

As Parents Forbid Covid Shots, Defiant Teenagers Seek Ways to Get Them

Most medical consent laws require parental permission for minors to get a vaccine. Now some places are easing restrictions for Covid shots while others are proposing new ones.

By Jan Hoffman
June 26, 2021, 12:07 p.m. ET

Teenagers keep all sorts of secrets from their parents. Drinking. Sex. Lousy grades.

But the secret that Elizabeth, 17, a rising high-school senior from New York City, keeps from hers is new to the buffet of adolescent misdeeds. She doesn’t want her parents to know that she is vaccinated against Covid-19.

Her divorced parents have equal say over her health care. Although her mother strongly favors the vaccine, her father angrily opposes it and has threatened to sue her mother if Elizabeth gets the shot. Elizabeth is keeping her secret not only from her father, but also her mother, so her mom can have plausible deniability. (Elizabeth asked to be identified only by her middle name.)

The vaccination of children is crucial to achieving broad immunity to the coronavirus and returning to normal school and work routines. But though Covid vaccines have been authorized for children as young as 12, many parents, worried about side effects and frightened by the newness of the shots, have held off from permitting their children to get them.

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only three in 10 parents of children between the ages of 12 through 17 intended to allow them to be vaccinated immediately. Many say they will wait for long-term safety data or the prod of a school mandate. But with many teenagers eager to get shots that they see as unlocking freedoms denied during the pandemic, tensions are crackling in homes in which parents are holding to a hard no.

Forty states require parental consent for vaccination of minors under 18, and Nebraska sets the age at 19. (Some states carve out exemptions for teenagers who are homeless or emancipated.) Now, because of the Covid crisis, some states and cities are seeking to relax medical consent rules, emulating statutes that permit minors to obtain the HPV vaccine, which prevents some cancers caused by a sexually transmitted virus.

Last fall, the District of Columbia City Council voted to allow children as young as 11 to get recommended vaccines without parental consent. New Jersey and New York Legislatures have bills pending that would allow children as young as 14 to consent to vaccines; Minnesota has one that would permit some children as young as 12 to consent to Covid shots.

But other states are marching in the opposite direction. Although South Carolina teenagers can consent at 16, and doctors may perform certain medically necessary procedures without parental permission on even younger children, a bill in the Legislature would explicitly bar providers from giving the Covid shot without parental consent to minors. In Oregon, where the age of medical consent is 15, Linn County ordered county-run clinics to obtain parental consent for the Covid shot for anyone under 18. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which has been tracking Covid-related bills, some states, including Tennessee and Alabama, are working on legislation to prevent public schools from requiring Covid shots.

The issue of who can consent to the Covid shots is providing fresh context for decades-old legal, ethical and medical questions. When parents disagree, who is the arbiter? At what age are children capable of making their own health decisions and how should that be determined?

“Isabella wants it because her friends are getting it, and she doesn’t want to wear a mask,” said Charisse, a mother of a 17-year-old in Delray Beach, Fla., who asked that her last name be withheld for family privacy. Charisse fears the shot could have an effect on her daughter’s reproductive system (a misperception that public health officials have repeatedly refuted).

“Isabella said, ‘It’s my body.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s my body until you’re 18.’”


As both the legal debates and family arguments unfold, those administering the vaccine at pharmacies, clinics and medical offices are trying to determine how to proceed when a young teen shows up for the Covid shot without a parent.

“We may be in a legal gray zone with this vaccine,” said Dr. Sterling Ransone Jr., a family physician in Deltaville, Va. In his health system, a parent can send a signed consent form for a teenager to be vaccinated. But because the Covid vaccine is authorized only for emergency use, the health system requires a parent to be present for a patient under 18 to get that shot.

Marina, 15, who lives in Palm Beach County, Fla., — and who, like others interviewed, asked not to be fully identified — longs for the shot. But her mother says absolutely not. The subject is not open for discussion.

And so Marina has been excluded from the social life she covets. “Five of my friends are throwing a party and they invited me, but then they said, ‘Are you vaccinated?’” she said. “So I can’t go. That hurts.”

As the pandemic ebbs, some teen social circles are reconstituting based on vaccination status. “I see my friends posting on social media — ‘Woo-Hoo I got it!’ — and now when I see them, they ask me things like, ‘Where have you been? Are you traveling a lot? Are you sure you don’t have Covid?’ It sucks that I can’t get the shot,” Marina continued.

Increasingly, frustrated teenagers are searching for ways to be vaccinated without their parents’ consent. Some have found their way to VaxTeen.org, a vaccine information site run by Kelly Danielpour, a Los Angeles teenager.

The site offers guides to state consent laws, links to clinics, resources on straightforward information about Covid-19 and advice for how teenagers can engage parents.

“Someone will ask me, ‘I need to be able to consent at a vaccine clinic that is open on weekends and that is on my bus route. Can you help?’” said Ms. Danielpour, 18, who will begin her freshman year at Stanford in the fall.

She started the site two years ago, well before Covid. The daughter of a pediatric neurosurgeon and an intellectual property lawyer, she realized that most adolescents know neither the recommended vaccine schedule nor their rights.

“We automatically talk about parents but not about teens as having opinions on this issue,” she said. “I decided I needed to help.” Ms. Danielpour wrangled experts to help her understand vaccination and consent laws, and she recruited teenagers to be “VaxTeen ambassadors.”

“I want teenagers to be able to say to pediatricians, ‘Hey, I have this right,’” added Ms. Danielpour, who gives talks at conferences to physicians and health department officials.


Elizabeth surreptitiously got her vaccine at a school pop-up clinic.

After administrators at her boarding school informed parents they would be offering Covid shots, her mother gave permission. Her father forbade it. Upset, Elizabeth consulted the school nurse, who said she could not be vaccinated without approval from both. Elizabeth researched state laws, learning that she wasn’t old enough to consent on her own.

She showed up anyway. At worst, she figured, the school would just turn her away.

Apparently, they took note only of her mother’s consent. Saying nothing, Elizabeth stuck out her arm.

Now she is in a pickle. The school is requiring students to be vaccinated for the fall semester and she says her father has begun warring with the administration over the issue. Elizabeth is afraid that if he learns how she was vaccinated, he will be furious and tell the school, which will discipline her for having deceived vaccinators, a stain on her record just as she is applying to college.

Gregory D. Zimet, a psychologist and professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, pointed out the irony of an adolescent being legally prevented from making a choice that was strenuously urged by public health officials.Developmentally, he said, adolescents at 14 and even younger are at least as good as adults at weighing the risks of a vaccine. “Which isn’t to say that adults are necessarily great at it,” he added.

In many states, young teenagers can make decisions around contraception and sexually transmitted infections, which are, he noted, “in many ways more complex and fraught than getting a vaccine.”

Pediatricians say that even parents who have themselves been vaccinated are wary for their children. Dr. Jay Lee, a family physician and chief medical officer of Share Our Selves, a community health network in Orange County, Calif., said parents say they would rather risk their child having Covid than get the new vaccine.

“I will validate their concerns,” Dr. Lee said, “but I point out that waiting to see if your child gets sick is not a good strategy. And that no, Covid is not just like the flu.”

Elise Yarnell, a senior clinic operations manager for the Portland, Ore., area at Providence, a large health care system, recalled a 16-year-old girl who showed up at a Covid vaccine clinic at her school in Yamhill County.

Her parents oppose the vaccine so she wanted to get it without them knowing, which she could do legally because Oregon’s age of consent is 15. She teared up when she saw the shots were not ready before she had to be home, but she was able to return that night without alerting her parents and was vaccinated.

“She was extremely relieved,” Ms. Yarnell said.

Isabella is the 17-year-old daughter of Charisse, the Delray Beach, Fla., mother who refuses to grant permission for the vaccine. Asked why she wanted the shot, Isabella gave a stream of reasons. “A lot of older people in my family are at risk for catching Covid and possibly dying,” she said. “I want to get the vaccine so I can be around them, and they’ll be safe. And then I can go out with my friends again, and they won’t be so much at risk either.”

Although doctors have been trying to instill vaccine confidence in parents as well as patients, there’s not much they can do when parents object. Recently, Dr. Mobeen H. Rathore, a pediatrics professor at the University of Florida medical college in Jacksonville, told a patient whose mother refused consent that she couldn’t get the Covid vaccine until she turned 18, three weeks hence.

“She got vaccinated on her birthday,” Dr. Rathore said. “She sent me a message saying that was her birthday gift to herself.”

Jan Hoffman writes about behavioral health and health law. Her wide-ranging subjects include opioids, vaping, tribes and adolescents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/heal ... ime-weight

[Rach3]

America not the only failure I guess. From NYT this am:

" Australian officials introduced a strict two-week lockdown for all of greater Sydney as an outbreak of the Delta variant spreads rapidly.

The stay-home orders mark the first full-city lockdown for Australia’s largest city since early 2020. Over the past 10 days, a cluster that began with an airport limousine driver has jumped to nearly 100 cases, with dozens more expected over the coming days. Most people in Sydney are unvaccinated .....

The U.K. on Saturday recorded its highest daily number of coronavirus infections since early February, raising questions over whether England will be able to end lockdown restrictions next month as planned. Britain’s health minister, Matt Hancock, resigned after violating Britain’s social-distancing guidelines. "

[Rach3]

Criminal behavior ? One more reason to boycott all things Wisconsin:


Senate Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is planning an event to publicize adverse vaccine experiences
Last Updated: June 26, 2021 at 10:18 a.m. ET
By Associated Press


MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a vocal critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, announced plans Friday to hold a news conference bringing together people who claim to have had adverse reactions to the vaccine, including the wife of a former Green Bay Packer player.

See: Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson to people who have been vaccinated against COVID: ‘What do you care if your neighbor has one or not?’

Johnson, who has also advocated for alternative and unproven treatments for COVID-19, said the Monday event in Milwaukee will allow people from across the country to tell their stories and concerns he said have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community.

Johnson, who has no medical training or expertise, hasn’t been vaccinated, saying he doesn’t think he has to because he had the virus last year and formed natural antibodies. He has said he’s “just asking questions” and isn’t against vaccines, but doctors and other critics have blasted him for spreading misinformation.


Dr. Jeff Huebner, a family doctor in Madison, said Johnson was “promoting dangerous and unfounded claims about COVID-19 vaccines” that contradict medical data and evidence.

“As a member of the Wisconsin medical community I’m gravely concerned about the impact his event and remarks will have on our ability to return to normal and protect Wisconsinites from COVID-19,” Huebner said in a statement.



Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. now are in people who weren’t vaccinated, with “breakthrough” infections in fully vaccinated people accounting for fewer than 1,200 of the more than 853,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations in May, based on an Associated Press analysis.

YouTube this month removed an interview Johnson did with the Milwaukee Press Club during which he touted the benefits of alternative treatments for COVID-19 and suspended Johnson for a week, saying his comments violated the company’s “medical misinformation policies.”


Johnson, during the June 3 event, criticized the administrations of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump for “not only ignoring but working against robust research [on] the use of cheap, generic drugs to be repurposed for early treatment of COVID.”

Johnson said Monday’s event at the federal courthouse in Milwaukee will include former Green Bay Packers offensive lineman Ken Ruettgers, a member of the Packers Hall of Fame, and his wife, Sheryl. Johnson said Sheryl Ruettgers will detail “severe neurological reactions that still inhibit her ability to live a normal life, including muscle pain, numbness, weakness and paresthesia” that she experienced after getting the COVID-19 vaccine this month.

Other speakers with similar stories are from Ohio, Missouri, Utah, Michigan and Tennessee.

The medical community has been consistent in stressing that the risk of side effects is exceedingly low and the benefits of getting vaccinated for the virus far outweigh the risks. Earlier this week, top U.S. government health officials, medical organizations, laboratory and hospital associations and others issued a statement touting the overriding benefit of the vaccines.

Still, certain elected officials in some states continue to push back against the vaccination recommendations.

On the same day the government and medical experts issued their statement on the vaccines’ benefits, Republican attorneys general in Louisiana, Alabama and Montana wrote to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 task force leader requesting a pause in recommending that children and healthy young adults get vaccinated against the disease.

The letter accused the CDC of providing “dismissive, misleading, and deadly advice” regarding incidents of heart inflammation among young people who get the vaccines.

U.S. health officials paused administration of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson JNJ, +0.51% vaccine for 11 days earlier this year, after 15 vaccine recipients — out of nearly 8 million people given the J&J vaccine — were found to have developed a highly unusual kind of blood clot. Experts said Wednesday that there also seems to be a link between the Pfizer and Moderna shots and some cases of heart inflammation. The Pfizer vaccine was jointly developed with German partner BioNTech .AstraZeneca’s vaccine, not authorized in the U.S., has been linked to instances of blood clotting by regulators in Europe.

Johnson’s seat is up for election in 2022, and he has not yet said whether he will seek a third term.


https://www.marketwatch.com/story/senat ... eid=yhoof2

[maestrob]

Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. now are in people who weren’t vaccinated, with “breakthrough” infections in fully vaccinated people accounting for fewer than 1,200 of the more than 853,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations in May, based on an Associated Press analysis.

How these totally medically ignorant public figures gain such credibility is totally beyond my ken.

Youtube's removal of his account was definitely the right move. That he can even attract such a large audience for his dangerous and bizarre opinions is unfathomable.

[Rach3]

How these totally medically ignorant public figures gain such credibility is totally beyond my ken.

Youtube's removal of his account was definitely the right move. That he can even attract such a large audience for his dangerous and bizarre opinions is unfathomable.

Trumpism ( and Trump ) kill.From NYT today:

"There is a political angle to these trends, of course. The places with the lowest vaccination rates tend to be heavily Republican. In an average U.S. county that voted for Donald Trump, only 34 percent of people are fully vaccinated, according to New York Times data. In an average country that voted for Joe Biden, the share is 45 percent (and the share that has received at least one shot is higher). No wonder, then, that the number of new cases keeps falling in Biden counties, while it has begun to rise in Trump counties."

[Rach3]

From NYT Coronavirus Newsletter today:

Outside of hospitals, especially in places with high vaccine rates, people have started to change the way they talk about the pandemic.

“Once this is all over” has become “now that this is all over.” Friends talk about a “post-pandemic” world, exhaling in a shared agreement that “things are back to normal.”

But not frontline workers.

Doctors and nurses are reeling from rising Covid-19 cases in parts of the U.S. But even where cases are in sharp decline, they’re also coping with burnout and prolonged stress from a pandemic that, for them, seems never-ending.
It’s not just frustration, exhaustion or post-traumatic stress. The pandemic worsened chronic staffing shortages, as thousands left the field or died on the frontlines.

In the South and Mountain West, where the transmissible Delta variant is gaining traction among the unvaccinated, staff members share a familiar sense of dread and frustration. Last time, they watched their neighbors refuse to wear masks or socially distance. This time, people refuse to get vaccines.

“People think they are exercising their rights by refusing to get vaccinated, but in reality, they’re exposing themselves and others to risk,” said Dr. Clay Smith, an emergency room doctor who travels between two distant hospitals in South Dakota and Wyoming.

In Missouri, caseloads increased more than 40 percent from two weeks earlier. In Springfield, the CoxHealth Medical Center had to reopen the 80-bed Covid unit it had shuttered in May. There, the Delta variant comprised 93 percent of all cases last week, said Dr. Terrence Coulter, a critical care specialist.

“The country has started the end zone dance before we cross the goal line,” Dr. Coulter said. “The truth is we’re fumbling the ball before we even get there.”

[maestrob]

Just so.

There was a young woman on CNN some months ago whose father had believed Trump (so she said) and had treated the virus as a nuisance rather than a threat to his life and refused to wear a mask & take other precautions. He died.

This poor young woman wept openly on TV and excoriated the White House for their gross mis-management and poor messaging of the virus. Her grief and rage was a terrible, wrenching thing to behold.

How many families have been torn asunder in red states by the vicious goal of Republicans to divide us so they can rule us?

How long will this go on?

It's a small thing, but I cannot see my nephew here in the city because he refuses to get the shot. He thinks he'll be fine if he just wears a mask, and him with an unvaccinated newborn son to protect?!!

Reason cannot penetrate this nonsense. My words mean nothing, and his wife's pleas fall on deaf ears.

600,000+ of us gone by now, and every death is now preventable.

[Rach3]

From WAPO's Coronavirus Newsletter today.Most of these people should be in jail; natural selection and evolution take too long:

" What had been a steady drop in nationwide cases has reverted to a rise, with infections ticking up in many U.S. states. At a news briefing Friday, White House Covid-19 Response Team coordinator Jeffrey Zients warned that “as the more transmissible delta variant continues to spread across the country, we will likely continue to experience an increase in covid cases in the weeks ahead.”

Making matters worse, in some communities hesitancy to get vaccines has flared into outright enmity against immunizations. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, attendees cheered at the country’s failure to meet President Biden's goal of 70 percent of adults having one dose by early July. Republican lawmakers said the president’s door-to-door vaccine campaign should be resisted. And Tennessee’s Department of Health will no longer provide information to teenagers on coronavirus vaccines — or any other vaccines — as the Tennessean reported this week."

[Rach3]

Opinion: Concerned vaccine skeptics push back against disturbing fad of teenagers living

Alexandra Petri
Columnist, WAPO
July 16, 2021


" TENNESSEE — Stunned by the tidal wave of teenagers receiving accurate health information and possibly even being vaccinated against communicable diseases, legislators here have rallied to put a halt to the startling mania that has swept from high school to high school.

Youths the state over were partaking of the fad in their pediatricians’ offices, seemingly as fast as they could get to the needles. But at the urging of Republican state legislators, Tennessee’s health department has stopped all vaccine outreach to minors, not just that pertaining to the covid-19 vaccine.

Concerned parties took swift action in Ohio, too, where legislators have prevented schools from following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention around vaccinations.

Thank heavens someone was pushing back against this horrible new pattern, protecting young people who would otherwise succumb and be vaccinated, almost guaranteeing them a miserable 60 or 70 additional years on the planet.

“Do you know what happens to the millions of teenagers who are vaccinated against diseases like polio and HPV?” a concerned party demanded. “It’s right there in the studies: They go on to lead healthy, normal lives instead of dying excruciating early deaths. Not only that, but they protect those around them through herd immunity."

The skeptics noted with horror that if their areas’ teenagers fell to peer pressure with this vaccination trend, they might grow up to be lawyers, accordion players or even members of state legislatures. “Some of them, when they become adults, may become the kind of people who have small dogs that they refer to as their ‘fur babies.’” All this, they noted, could be prevented by just saying no to vaccination now.

Clearly, standards had declined over the past hundred years. “Contracting polio and dying was a fact of life for my grandparents’ generation,” observed one ardent opponent. “But Gen Z and the coddled kids these days somehow think they should get some sort of escape from that reality simply because medical science has improved and such deaths today would be not only unnecessary but utterly pointless?"

Vaccination, as pediatricians have long observed, can be a gateway into years of engagement with modern medical science. First, a youngster is getting vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella, and then before you know it, they are dosing themselves with annual flu vaccinations and, in some cases, penicillin. “It’s a cycle,” one doctor noted. “Get them access to lifesaving medicine when they’re young, and you have someone who will keep coming back for more of it for decades.”

These skeptics worried that the administration of what kids are reportedly calling “the shot,” “the jab” or even “the Fauci ouchie” would have devastating effects on young adults in their communities, allowing them to grow up and, perhaps, pay taxes, or host gender-reveal parties that would set large swaths of forest land on fire.

“Don’t they have any idea what we’re doing to the earth?” asked another adult. “They won’t want to be alive in seven or eight decades, a terrifying fate that getting vaccinated now will make all the more likely. By then, the planet might well be ravaged by heat and scarcity!”
"I don’t want the teenagers to die decades from now because of my utter recklessness with the planet,” the adult noted. “I want them to die right away, from preventable diseases, as God intended.”

But, happily, a glimmer of hope has emerged that the tide might be turned against this craze after all: President Biden had fallen short of his July 4 vaccination goals. From Tennessee and beyond, the cheers rang out as skeptics rejoiced in the thought that because of their courageous opposition to these vaccines, thousands of people of all ages would die who otherwise might not have. There was still a chance that this dangerous fad of teenagers living might be stopped."


Additionally:
Over 52% of American teens want to get vaccinated. 56% of American parents with unvaccinated teens dont want them to do so.As usual, most children smarter than most parents.

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19 ... wj96i5U%3d

[maestrob]

How Republican Vaccine Opposition Got to This Point

In recent months, Republican skepticism of Covid vaccines and their rollout has grown louder: One recent poll found that 47 percent said they weren’t likely to get vaccinated.


By Lisa Lerer
July 17, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

After Sherri Tenpenny, a Cleveland-area doctor, falsely suggested during a hearing last month in the Ohio House of Representatives that Covid vaccines left people “magnetized” and could “interface” with 5G cellular towers, Republican lawmakers thanked her for her “enlightening” testimony.

In Congress, Republicans who once praised the Trump administration for its work facilitating the swift development of the vaccines now wage campaigns of vaccine misinformation, sowing doubts about safety and effectiveness from the Capitol.

And this week, Republican state lawmakers in Tennessee successfully pressured health officials to stop outreach to children for all vaccines. The guidance prohibits sending reminders about the second dose of a Covid vaccine to adolescents who had received one shot and communicating about routine inoculations, like the flu shot.

A wave of opposition to Covid vaccines has risen within the Republican Party, as conservative news outlets produce a steady diet of misinformation about vaccines and some G.O.P. lawmakers invite anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists to testify in statehouses and Congress. With very little resistance from party leaders, these Republican efforts have elevated falsehoods and doubts about vaccinations from the fringes of American life to the center of our political conversation.

It’s a pattern that was seen throughout the Trump administration: Rather than rebuke conspiratorial thinking and inaccuracies when they begin spreading among their party’s base, many Republicans tolerate extremist misinformation.

Some conservatives promulgate the falsehoods as a way to rally their political base, embracing ideas like a stolen election, rampant voter fraud and revisionist history about the deadly siege at the Capitol. Many others say very little at all, preferring to dodge questions from the news media.

Those who do speak up remain reluctant to specifically name colleagues who have given voice to misinformation, or to call out media personalities who have done so, like Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

“We don’t control conservative media figures so far as I know — at least I don’t,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, told The New York Times recently. “That being said, I think it’s an enormous error for anyone to suggest that we shouldn’t be taking vaccines.”

Anti-vaccination sentiment isn’t new to Republican voters. During the 2016 Republican presidential primary race, a number of candidates, including Donald J. Trump, repeated debunked theories that vaccines caused autism in children. Around that time, Republican state legislators began opposing laws that would tighten vaccine requirements for children.

But over the past few months, the shift within the party has accelerated, as some supporters of Mr. Trump embrace the belief that the national effort to promote Covid vaccinations is harmful, unconstitutional or perhaps even a sign of a nefarious government plot.


“Think about what those mechanisms could be used for,” Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina said of the Biden administration’s plan to go door-to-door to reach millions of unvaccinated Americans, going on to claim without evidence: “They could then go door-to-door to take your guns. They could go door-to-door to take your Bibles.”

In a report this month, the Kaiser Family Foundation found a growing vaccination divide between Republican and Democratic areas, with nearly 47 percent of people in counties won by President Biden fully vaccinated, compared with 35 percent of people in Trump counties. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 47 percent of Republicans said they weren’t likely to get vaccinated, compared with just 6 percent of Democrats.

As Covid cases across the country rise, nearly all recent hospitalizations and deaths have occurred among unvaccinated people, White House officials have said. While the national outlook remains much better than during previous upticks, Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, this week issued his first advisory of the Biden administration, warning of the “urgent threat” of health misinformation.

There’s a tendency among Republican leaders to quietly — and sometimes not-so-quietly — attribute the support for fringe beliefs and figures to Mr. Trump. But when it comes to vaccinations, it’s difficult to pin the blame on the former president.

Mr. Trump has eagerly taken credit for the accelerated development process of the vaccines, and has urged Americans to get vaccinated. (He did, however, quietly receive a vaccine in private before he left office, rather than hold a public event for the shot that might have encouraged his supporters to follow his lead.) In an interview with Fox News last month, the former president expressed some concern about vaccinating “very young people” but said he remained a “big believer in what we did with the vaccine.”

“it’s incredible what we did,” he said. “You see the results.”

Other Republicans have not remained quite as steadfast in their echoing of Mr. Trump’s message on vaccines. Last year, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin praised Trump’s “brilliant” Operation Warp Speed. This year, he has made a number of dubious claims about adverse reactions and deaths linked to the vaccines.

In March, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia praised Mr. Trump for saving lives with the vaccines. This month, she urged Americans to “just say no” to the vaccine, using Nazi-era imagery to criticize the Biden administration’s effort to reach unvaccinated people.

“People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations,” she tweeted. “You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment.”

Less than a week later, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, encouraged Americans to get vaccinated, citing his experience as a childhood survivor of polio.

“We have not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines, so I’m perplexed by the difficulty we have finishing the job,” he said.

Yet when asked by a reporter whether some of the challenge could stem from the words of members of his own party, Mr. McConnell demurred.

“I’ve already answered the question about how I feel about this,” he said. “I can only speak for myself, and I just did a few minutes ago.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/p ... e=Homepage

[Rach3]

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Yet when asked by a reporter whether some of the challenge could stem from the words of members of his own party, Mr. McConnell demurred.

“I’ve already answered the question about how I feel about this,” he said. “I can only speak for myself, and I just did a few minutes ago.”

That's rich.He never hesitates to speak for " the American people " on any number of other matters dear to the GOP's and Trump's heart.Fraud.