Vaccination, Choice, Public Health Options 2

Don Winslow donwinslow | 4:16 PM · Aug 1, 2021:

NEW VIDEO: #UniteAgainstCovid August 1, 2021.
Narrated by @Jeff_Daniels
600,000+ Americans dead. Please quote tweet/retweet
1:42 ( https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1421927902753427456 )

Great that some Rs are now telling their people to get vaxxed.
Hoping they can undo some of the damage, though can't bring back their dead listeners and their contacts...

The Daily Show Salutes the Heroes of the Pandumbic
2:58 ( https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1246146713523453957 )

Hannity. Rush. Dobbs. Ingraham. Pirro. Nunes. Tammy. Geraldo. Doocy. Hegseth. Schlapp. Siegel. Watters. Dr. Drew. Henry. Ainsley. Gaetz. Inhofe. Pence. Kudlow. Conway. Trump.

Today, we salute the Heroes of the Pandumbic.

- The Daily Show @TheDailyShow | 2:45 PM · Apr 3, 2020

Podcast:

"The Data Is Clear; Getting Vaccinated Against COVID-19 Is an 'Easy Decision'"
Conversation between Eric Topol, MD, and Sam Harris (author)
https://podclips.com/c/UpEVjo

via https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1422269301931724810

The latest terrible pandemic trend? Vaccine hypocrites (Guardian)

Some people have been wearing disguises to vaccine appointments, because they don’t want to be seen by anti-vax friends. The culprit? Culture war capitalism...

No, exercise and healthy eating are not 'the best way' to avoid getting COVID-19
Tom Kertscher | August 3, 2021

Exercise and healthy eating can maintain the body’s immune system and reduce the risk of severe illness from COVID-19. But diet and exercise alone don’t stop people from contracting COVID-19.

Public health authorities say masking, social distancing and vaccination are the best ways to guard against COVID-19 infection.

..."The best way to avoid COVID altogether is to exercise, eat healthy and let your immune system beat it naturally," claims the Instagram post, which calls getting a vaccination instead "lazy." ...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/aug/03/facebook-posts/no-exercise-and...

Fact check: COVID-19 vaccine isn’t advertised on TV due to emergency authorization
Ella Lee | Aug 4, 2021

...“Ever wonder why the covid vaccine isn’t advertised on TV like other medicines or other vaccines? Because any medicine or vaccine advertised on TV is required by US law to mention the side affects (sic) in the ads no matter what they are,” an Instagram post with more than 3,800 likes reads.

...While some aspects of the claim are true, its overall conclusion is false.

...Dr. Robert Califf, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, told CNBC in May that companies can’t promote their products under an Emergency Use Authorization – and currently, all three COVID-19 vaccines are authorized via EUAs. Once the vaccines are fully approved by the FDA, that would change....

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/04/fact-check-covid-19-vac...

So yesterday I started the re-vaccination process. A nurse from the county health dept. even came to my home to do it. Originally I was vaccinated in late February and mid March but after my bone marrow transplant in April my transplant doctor advised me in June to try to get re-vaccinated for Covid in August. He also told me that it might be difficult because NYS as far as he knew had no protocols for being re-vaccinated. What I did was email the CDC who more or less replied ‘you’re fucked’. I then emailed both my district State Senator and the county executive both of whom are republicans by the way. The way I look at it if you want and attain such a job you become ipso facto the community sounding board. Doesn’t mean I have to vote for them at all. In any event the office of the State Senator got back to me and got the whole process in motion.

So I’ll thank them for that. As far as voting for him the ideological gap between him and me is just too massive to ignore and I’m still miffed at the English canvasser he sent my way one day who when I told her about my socialist perspectives she started extolling the virtues of Margaret Thatcher and claiming that if I got my way that the government would soon be forcing me to accept any number of people under my roof—all this happening in my driveway on a wintry day as my friend was leaving with his bass guitar and I had a beer in my hand. An absurd situation and she was a clown so I told her to beat it and she left a bit miffed.

>9 lriley: The way I look at it if you want and attain such a job you become ipso facto the community sounding board. Doesn’t mean I have to vote for them at all... So I’ll thank them for that.

Glad to hear you are getting the revaccination. Your comment reminds me of what they used to say about Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland. He was a rabid anti-Catholic and anti-republican, but it was said that as a Member of Parliament he always helped his constituents regardless of which side of the religious and political divide they were on.

"...reductions of 7·7% ... for DTP3 (3rd dose diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis) and 7·9% ... for MCV1 (first dose measles- containing vaccine), compared to expected doses delivered in the absence of the COVID-19 pandemic...millions of children (worldwide) under-vaccinated or unvaccinated against preventable diseases at the end of 2020, and these gaps are likely to extend throughout 2021..."

Isaac Bogoch (infectious disease U Toronto) @BogochIsaac | 7:53 AM · Aug 6, 2021
Significant global disruption to routine childhood vaccination (e.g. measles, pertussis) due to #COVID19.
Now (increased) concern for preventable outbreaks.
This is prompting calls to "accelerate progress towards higher & more equitable vaccination coverage."

Image-bar graphs children missing doses by region 2020
https://twitter.com/BogochIsaac/status/1423613315620691971/photo/1

Image-graph monthly coverage DTP3 (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis) & MCVI (measles-containing vaccine) by region 2020
https://twitter.com/BogochIsaac/status/1423613315620691971/photo/2
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Kate Causey et al. 2021. Estimating global and regional disruptions to routine childhood vaccine coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: a modelling study. The Lancet Volume 398, ISSUE 10299, P522-534, August 07, 2021 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)01337-4 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01337-4/fullt...

Summary
...Findings
Globally, in 2020, estimated vaccine coverage was 76·7%...for DTP3 and 78·9%...for MCV1, representing relative reductions of 7·7% ... for DTP3 and 7·9% ... for MCV1, compared to expected doses delivered in the absence of the COVID-19 pandemic. From January to December, 2020, we estimated that 30·0 million ... children missed doses of DTP3 and 27·2 million... children missed MCV1 doses. Compared to expected gaps in coverage for eligible children in 2020, these estimates represented an additional 8·5 million ... children not routinely vaccinated with DTP3 and an additional 8·9 million ... children not routinely vaccinated with MCV1 attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, monthly disruptions were highest in April, 2020, across all GBD super-regions, with 4·6 million ... children missing doses of DTP3 and 4·4 million ... children missing doses of MCV1. Every GBD super-region saw reductions in vaccine coverage in March and April, with the most severe annual impacts in north Africa and the Middle East, south Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. We estimated the lowest annual reductions in vaccine delivery in sub-Saharan Africa, where disruptions remained minimal throughout the year. For some super-regions, including southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania for both DTP3 and MCV1, the high-income super-region for DTP3, and south Asia for MCV1, estimates suggest that monthly doses were delivered at or above expected levels during the second half of 2020.

Interpretation
Routine immunisation services faced stark challenges in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic causing the most widespread and largest global disruption in recent history. Although the latest coverage trajectories point towards recovery in some regions, a combination of lagging catch-up immunisation services, continued SARS-CoV-2 transmission, and persistent gaps in vaccine coverage before the pandemic still left millions of children under-vaccinated or unvaccinated against preventable diseases at the end of 2020, and these gaps are likely to extend throughout 2021. Strengthening routine immunisation data systems and efforts to target resources and outreach will be essential to minimise the risk of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, reach children who missed routine vaccine doses during the pandemic, and accelerate progress towards higher and more equitable vaccination coverage over the next decade.

CNN fires unvaccinated employees for going to office (BBC)

US news network CNN has sacked three employees for going into an office without having been vaccinated against Covid, US media say. It is one of the first examples of a US firm firing staff for breaching a company vaccination mandate. It is legal in the US for firms to require employees to be vaccinated. Many large firms - including Facebook and Google - say they will require employees to be vaccinated when offices fully re-open in the months ahead...

Isaac Bogoch (U Toronto) @BogochIsaac | Aug 7, 2021·
A probable case of Marburg virus was just detected in Guinea. Confirmatory testing is underway.
It causes a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola.
Vaccines are under development but none are approved as of yet.

Probable Case Of Ebola-Like Marburg Virus In Guinea
Judy Stone | Aug 6, 2021

A probable case of Marburg virus was reported in Guinea in Tèmessadou M'boke, prefecture of Guéckédou, on 8/5/21. This is significant because the virus causes a hemorrhagic fever, similar to Ebola, another filovirus. This would be the first time Marburg has been identified in West Africa. Guéckédou is also the same region that suffered an Ebola outbreak this year.

...Treatment is aggressive supportive care. There are no known effective antivirals or vaccines and treatments for Ebola are not effective in Marburg.

The only good news in this is that Marburg epidemics have historically been smaller and better contained than Ebola.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2021/08/06/probable-case-of-ebola-like-ma...

No, the mRNA Vaccines Do Not Contain Graphene Oxide
Alex Kasprak | 6 August 2021. Updated 7 August 2021

Karen Kingston, who worked in a non-scientific role at Pfizer from 1996-1998, claimed she found evidence of "poison" in the mRNA vaccines.

...FALSE...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/graphene-oxide-mrna-vaccines/

Declining Vaccine Because of Myocarditis Fears?

Myocarditis is more common after covid-19 infection than vaccination.

In the past few months, some cases of. . .myocarditis, have been recorded following the use of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

The reaction happens most often in men and boys aged under 30 after their second dose, and is usually seen within 10 days. . .

Researchers analysed the records of healthcare organisations that cover a fifth of the US population. They found that, during the first 12 months of the pandemic, males aged 12 to 17 were most likely to develop myocarditis within three months of catching covid-19, at a rate of about 450 cases per million infections.

This compares with 67 cases of myocarditis per million males of the same age following their second dose of a Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, according to figures from the US Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Researchers added together cases after first and second doses to reach a total rate of 77 cases per million in this male age group triggered by vaccination, a sixth that seen after infection.

Vaccination is clearly the intelligent choice.

NHS still not recognising British citizens’ overseas Covid jabs, says peer (Guardian)

Britons vaccinated abroad are still struggling to get their jabs registered with the NHS, a Lib Dem peer has warned, despite government promises that measures would be in place by the end of last month.

Brian Paddick, a former London mayoral candidate and a member of the House of Lords, said the government was “yet again, promising things that they fail to deliver” after his GP was unable to register vaccinations he had in Norway, where he has been staying.

This means that Lord Paddick, like many British nationals vaccinated abroad, cannot get an NHS Covid pass, which is needed to avoid quarantine when returning from amber-list countries and, from September, may be required to enter some bars and venues...

Covid vaccine: Fertility and miscarriage claims fact-checked (BBC)

False and misleading claims that Covid-19 vaccines harm fertility and cause miscarriages are still circulating online, against all the evidence. Doctors are extremely cautious about what they recommend during pregnancy, so the original advice was to avoid the jab. But now, so much safety data has become available that this advice has changed and the vaccine is now actively encouraged (as getting Covid can put a pregnancy at risk). We have looked at some of the more persistent claims - and why they are wrong...

I Am Legend screenwriter dismisses anti-vax claims based on film's plot (BBC)

One of the writers of the sci-fi film I Am Legend has clarified its fictional nature amid rumours Covid-19 vaccines would turn people into zombies. The 2007 film, starring Will Smith, is about a failed attempt to genetically re-engineer measles to cure cancer, killing 99% of the world's population. Those who survive the infection turn into mutant vampiric creatures. Claims that something similar would happen to people receiving Covid jabs have been circulating on social media.

Last week, the New York Times reported that the owner of an eyewear store in the Bronx, New York, was struggling to persuade some of its staff to get a Covid vaccine, with one citing the plot of I Am Legend as a concern. "One employee said she was concerned because she thought a vaccine had caused the characters in the film I Am Legend to turn into zombies," the report said. Responding to the article, Akiva Goldsman, 59, who co-wrote the screenplay based on a 1954 novel of the same name, tweeted: "Oh. My. God. It's a movie. I made that up. It's. Not. Real"...

Anti-vaxxers Are Not a Protected Group

Republican refusniks have been trying to convince us that mandating vaccines discriminates against them and impinges on their personal freedom to the point that public health mandates are illegal. But courts have historically -- since the smallpox outbreak of the early 20th century that hit NY hard -- that the government has the legal right to mandate immunizations against communicable diseases in order to protect the "commonweal" from the ravages of potentially fatal diseases and the ravages of epidemic on the helpless, such as the aged and infirm and young children.

Mandates against non medical interventions with the same intended effect as immunizations may be considered similarly by the courts if more lawsuits by entities like school boards sue governors who declare a ban on such mandates. They may also give the president and executives on down to the community level the room to mandate both jabs and masks that would be upheld if challenged.

Courts in all civil actions tend to apply a sort of Occam's Razor to their rulings -- finding in favor of common sense because common sense rarely (if ever) impinges on civil rights and the intention of common sense actions, such as vaccine and mask mandates, is to protect the public interest.

Courts have ruled that religion is no excuse for not complying with immunization mandates instituted by private schools during the historically recent measles epidemic that resulted when Orthodox Jewish families refused to vaccinate their children, in spite of the local yeshivas' policies of no jab, no classroom instruction. The courts maintained that that it was just too bad if their children were deprived of in-school education that the parents insisted was their "right" even though they defied yeshiva policy. In short, the judges held that the unvaccinated are not a special group whose "right" to go to school was trampled because the parents refused to comply with reasonable demands from the school in order to protect all other students and personnel. Parents had to vaccinate, or the child had to stay home from school. Period. Most parents complied.

Considering the history and reasoning of the courts, IMO federal mandates for vaccination and even masking will maintain if and when challenged in the courts by misguided and loony right wingers. More and more businesses, governmental agencies, and now all active duty military personnel are required to get vaccinated by mandate or risk being excluded from work. Vaccination, as a condition of employment whether by the private civilian sector or military is perfectly legal. How could courts turn around and say that such mandates are suddenly illegal when the purpose is identical, only it's in the public space of schools, churches, and sports venues, for instance? They would have a hard time arguing against all the established precedent in American history when dealing with the public health scourges that smallpox and measles outbreaks were.

The determination of some to put their own lives plus others at risk to prove some kind of ‘freedom’ point is not doing anyone any good—their obstinacy only continues to feed the covid fire. FWIW Trump himself has told people to get vaccinated. He’s not been very forceful about it and he needs to be because it’s his fanatics that are doing most all of the risking.

Airborne vaccine: The flights taking on Covid-19 in South Sudan (WFP)

Kicking up dust 10ft high, an aircraft touches down on the airstrip in Pochalla – a remote town – a two-hour flight east of Juba, South Sudan’s capital. The co-pilot jumps out of the plane and hands an icebox to aid workers who whisk it away to a hospital. This is one of the many journeys carried out by the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) which has so far transported 30,000 COVID-19 vaccines countrywide on behalf of the Government and in partnership with the World Health Organization and UNICEF...

Righteous Anger

Jason Arena, 45, from Mooresville, North Carolina is an ordinary man. He's married and his wife has stage four breast cancer who recently needed hospitalization to drain accumulating fluid from her condition and treatment. He was infuriated when she was booted from the hospital early, still needing treatment and care.

Why? Because the hospital was being overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients. His anger spurred him to make a video rant, a sort of open letter to COVID deniers, anti-vaxxers, and mask refusniks It's gone viral.

Here's an excerpt of what he had to say.

“If you don’t trust the medical field to prevent you from getting it, why do you trust them to cure you from it?

“Stick to your fucking guns and keep your motherfucking ass at home,. Stop running to the hospital, putting everybody else at fucking risk and in turn the collateral damages; people like my wife who actually need medical fucking help for a chronic disease but get kicked out of the hospital because your dumb ass is too stupid to go get a fucking vaccine shot.”

Amen.

". . .in North Carolina, only 0.5% of people who’ve received a COVID-19 vaccine have ended up requiring hospital treatment."

See entire video here.

Covid-19: Canada to require vaccination for all federal workers by autumn (BBC)

All civil servants in Canada must be vaccinated by the end of October or risk losing their jobs, the government has announced. The mandate also applies to workers in federally regulated sectors, like rail. Commercial air, cruise and interprovincial train passengers must also be vaccinated to travel. Canada has one of the highest Covid vaccination rates in the world, with 81% of eligible people having received at least one dose. "This is the best way to end the pandemic and allow the economy to safely remain open," said Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc...

Does respect for human life mean vaccine mandates? Among religious groups, there is wide disagreement.
Michelle Boorstein | August 10, 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/08/10/vaccine-mandate-catholic-budd...

Your wallet may become the latest casualty in the COVID-19 vaccine battle
Lois M. Collins@Loisco | Aug 13, 2021

Employers, insurance companies and health care providers weigh options to boost vaccination numbers by wielding a financial stick instead of a carrot

https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/8/13/22618828/how-your-wallet-is-the-la...

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From $1-Million Lotteries to Free Beer: Do COVID Vaccination Incentives Work?
Doling out cash rewards and lifting mask mandates could increase vaccine uptake, some research suggests
Tanya Lewis | June 17, 2021

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-1-million-lotteries-to-free-beer...

No, Marine Gen. David Berger Did Not Berate Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin Over Vaccines
RealRawNews.com is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a reliable source of information on much of anything.
Dan MacGuill | 13 August 2021

Claim
In the summer of 2021, U.S. Marines Commandant David Berger berated Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin over plans to implement mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for U.S. troops.

Rating
Labeled Satire

...On Aug. 10, 2021, RealRawNews.com published an article positing that U.S. Marine Commandant David Berger had berated Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin over plans to implement mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for members of the U.S. military, calling him a “traitor” and vowing: “There will be no mandatory vaccinations for my Marines.”

...This item was not a factual recounting of real-life events. The article originated with a website that describes its output as being humorous or satirical in nature, as follows: "Information on this website is for informational and educational and entertainment purposes. This website contains humor, parody, and satire. We have included this disclaimer for our protection, on the advice on legal counsel."...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/berger-lloyd-austin/

Indiana doctor spreads Covid-19 misinformation during school board meeting
Natalie Wade, AFP USA Facebook Twitter Email Published on Friday 13 August 2021 at 16:46

A video has been shared across social media of Dr Daniel Stock, as he makes several false and misleading statements while giving testimony at a school board meeting in the US state of Indiana. He repeats previously debunked myths about Covid-19 vaccines, inaccurately claims that face masks are ineffective in slowing the spread of the virus, and touts unapproved treatments.

"Doctor Addresses School Board over Futility of Mask Mandates and Covid-19 Protocols in most Schools," says the text over a video shared in an August 7, 2021 Facebook post. The video features Dr Daniel Stock as he addresses the Mt Vernon Board of School Trustees in Fortville, Indiana...

...AFP debunks three statements made by Stock.

Claim: "Coronavirus and all other respiratory viruses, they are spread by aerosol particles which are small enough to go through every mask."...

Claim: "No vaccine, even the ones I may support and would give to myself and my children, ever stops infection."...

Claim: "I can tell you having treated over 15 Covid-19 patients that between active loading with vitamin D, ivermectin and zinc that there is not a single person who has come anywhere near the hospital."...

https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252F9L24R2-1

>27 margd:

Am I to conclude that Dr. Stock's patients bypass the hospital and go straight to the morgue?

Vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of people’s broken relationship with the stat (Guardian)

From Khartoum to Kansas, vaccine conspiracy theorists have one thing in common: they have lost their faith in government...

The world is making billions of Covid vaccine doses, so why is Africa not getting them? (Guardian) by Gordon Brown

While western governments get ready to administer booster shots, millions in Africa are still completely unprotected...

Fact check: COVID-19 vaccine protects both the person vaccinated and those around them
Devon Link | Aug 16, 2021

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/16/fact-check-covid-19-vac...

>30 John5918:

U.S. announces plan to offer boosters to all Americans starting in late September (PBS)

The additional doses will be available to people eight months after they received their second dose...

Meanwhile, people in many parts of the world have not even had the chance to receive a first dose of the vaccine. Nobody and no nation is safe from COVID until everybody is safe.

Getting Covid jab is an ‘act of love’, says Pope Francis (Guardian)

The pontiff made his appeal in a video produced by the Vatican and the Ad Council, a non-profit US group that has previously made videos promoting vaccination against Covid. He praised the work of scientists for producing safe and effective vaccines.

“Thanks to God and to the work of many, we now have vaccines to protect us from Covid-19,” he said in the video. “Vaccines bring hope to end the pandemic, but only if they are available to all and if we collaborate with one another.”

Francis said being inoculated with vaccines authorised by competent authorities was “an act of love”. “Vaccination is a simple but profound way of promoting the common good and caring for each other, especially the most vulnerable,” he said. The pope has previously spoken about the importance of the Covid-19 jab, while emphasising that vaccinations must be distributed equally, especially to poor countries. The video is aimed at a global audience, and features bishops from the US and Central and South America...

Worshipers “to be fully vaccinated” as Church Attendance Resumes in Zimbabwe (ACI Africa)

Those to participate in public worship will have received COVID-19 vaccination, the Bishop of Zimbabwe’s Chinhoyi Diocese has announced amid the easing of coronavirus restrictions in the Southern African nation. In a move that follows the August 11 Zimbabwean government directive that only fully-vaccinated people attend public worship, Bishop Raymond Tapiwa Mupandasekwa underscores the need to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. “We have received an invitation from the Government of Zimbabwe to reopen our Churches and begin to gather again for Church services yet on condition that the attendants be fully vaccinated,” Bishop Mupandasekwa says in a statement issued Tuesday, August 17. The Zimbabwean Bishop adds, “Only fully vaccinated priests will be allowed to celebrate (Holy) Mass with congregants”...

</b>Want To Get More Americans Vaccinated?

In states, localities, institutions, and businesses that have mask/testing mandates, exists a perfect way to get people to accept vaccination as the preferred condition.

Consider that many entities are requiring twice weekly testing for COVID if unvaccinated. Simply CHARGE people for the test at a rate that covers all the expense undertaken to make those tests and the results available.

I should think $25.00/test should be the minimum fee. When people start paying about $200/month in order to stay employed instead of getting a FREE vaccine so they can, then they'll come to their economic senses, damn their "principles."

Some companies/corporations are hesitating on mandating their employees be vaccinated on the FDA approving those vaccines. According to The NY Times approval for the Pfizer vaccine should come in early September. I hope that this is true and that employers begin to make employment conditional on employees being vaccinated.

Jimmy Deyoung a Christian radio host may be showing up as a note in the Written in Stone—the literary cemetery group any day now since he wrote a few books. Seems he had an anti-vax message for his listeners. Covid vaccines were a way for the government to control the population he said. Ironically however Mr. Deyoung caught covid and died in a hospital from it. Moral of this story is those unvaccinated should learn from the misinformation peddled by Mr. Deyoung and not make the same mistake that he did. Get vaccinated.

So while I’m on the subject of right wing anti-vax radio hosts Dick Farrel from Florida is no longer with us in this world anymore because of covid as well. At least he wasn’t as sneaky about it as Tucker Carlson who is vaccinated per Fox News studio policy but won’t admit it.

Now Phil Valentine a right wing radio host from Tennessee with an audience large enough that he has his own Wikipedia entry repurposed the Beatles song Taxman into Vaxman. He also told his listeners that an anti-bacterial drug ivermectin was a covid cure. That’s something a person can get if they can get a prescription from their doctor for a tapeworm or something. Otherwise they’ll need to hit up an animal feed store. But anyway this is what Valentine would tell his audience and early in July his anti-bacterial solution failed him and he got covid and he ended up in the hospital and he’s still in the hospital and intubated for over a month now and listed as critical for at least the last three weeks.

If Valentine survives his brother Mark (who since has been vaccinated) says he will tell his audience to get vaccinated which would be a good thing. That said if you do beat covid after a month on a ventilator you just don’t rise out of bed good as new. For one thing between the virus and the breathing machine his lungs have taken a massive beating. So who knows what he’s going to be able to do anytime soon.

New suggestion for Valentines radio show. Leave the Beatles alone. Bad Religion’s We’re only going to die fits much better particularly the chorus—we’re going to die of our own arrogance.

On the subject of right wing vaccine-deniers who then catch a bad dose of COVID, here's one from the Catholic stable:

Vaccine skeptic US cardinal on ventilator after Covid diagnosis (Guardian)

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a staunch conservative in the US Catholic church who has emerged as a leading critic of Pope Francis and a vaccine skeptic, was placed on a ventilator just days after testing positive for Covid-19. “Doctors are encouraged by his progress,” the cardinal’s official Twitter account announced. Supporters were asked to “pray the Rosary for him”. The 73-year-old, who has frequently been seen maskless in Rome, where he lives, tested positive last Wednesday while visiting Wisconsin...

Last May, Burke spoke out forcefully against Covid-19 vaccines, saying: “It must be clear that vaccination itself cannot be imposed, in a totalitarian manner, on citizens.” He also said vaccines had been developed “through the use of the cell lines of aborted fetuses” and that “a kind of microchip needs to be placed under the skin of every person, so that any moment he or she can be controlled by the state regarding health and about other matters which we can only imagine”. Experts on health and misinformation have repeatedly debunked such conspiracy theories...

A happy story:

An Alabama Woman’s Neighborly Vaccination Campaign
In “The Panola Project,” Dorothy Oliver fights vaccine hesitancy with kindness.
Film by Rachael DeCruz and Jeremy S. Levine (16:38)
Text by Yasmine Al-Sayyad | August 11, 2021

...Alabama has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country; only fifty-six per cent of adults have gotten at least one dose. Nearly everyone in Panola has—a striking ninety-four per cent of adults—including every single person above the age of sixty-five.

...“The Panola Project,” a short documentary by Rachael DeCruz and Jeremy S. Levine, is a heartwarming story of this marginal phenomenon. It follows the efforts of a retired Black woman, Dorothy Oliver, and the county commissioner, Drucilla Russ-Jackson, to bring the vaccine to her isolated hamlet of about four hundred residents in rural Alabama, and to persuade enough of her community to take it. “I just felt like I had to do it because the government, nobody does enough in this area,” she says. “This area here is majority Black. Kind of puts you on the back burner. That’s just it. I mean, you don’t have to put nothing else with that. That’s just it. I don’t have to elaborate on that one.”

Panola never had its own vaccine center. The closest options were thirty to forty miles away, and many residents don’t have cars. In the film, Oliver and Russ-Jackson arrange for a hospital to set up a pop-up site in Panola, but the site will only be established if they get at least forty people to sign up to take the vaccine. We follow Oliver as she goes door to door, talking people into signing up, lightly cajoling them about their fears and concerns. When I asked her how she does it, her answer was disarmingly simple: “I just be nice to them,” she said. “I don’t go at them saying, ‘You gotta do that.’ ” DeCruz, too, was struck by the way Oliver and Jackson talked to people who were on the fence about the vaccine, an issue more often discussed with stridency of various types. “There’s this very warm and kind of loving and caring way that Dorothy and Ms. Jackson approached those conversations, even when people aren’t in agreement. And it wasn’t done in a way that’s, like, ‘I know better than you.’ ”...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/an-alabama-womans-n...

Another happy story:

Transnet Vaccine Train To Commence Operations (Railways Africa)

Transnet SOC Ltd (“Transnet”) through its Corporate Social Investment (CSI) arm – will be commencing operations of a vaccination train, ‘Transvaco’, in support of government efforts to reach herd immunity against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Modelled on the Phelophepa health trains, which have been providing primary healthcare services in under-serviced areas across South Africa over the past 27 years, the Transvaco aims to reach, and vaccinate, communities in remote parts of the country, and areas where health facilities are over-burdened. The train, which has state-of-the-art vaccine facilities - including ultra-low temperature vaccine fridges - was designed and built by Transnet’s manufacturing division, Transnet Engineering. The train can store up to 108 000 vials of different types of COVID-19 vaccines...

Andy Slavitt (frmr COVID czar in BidenWH) @ASlavitt | 1:41 PM · Aug 21, 2021:
COVID Update: Anti-vaxxers on Twitter/Facebook are a whole different breed from people who haven’t been vaccinated IRL. 1/

In my work to combat misinformation, I learned a lot & got a good read from experts at this while extensively polling & focus grouping what real people who aren’t vaccinated think. 2/

Inside the White House-Facebook Rift Over Vaccine Misinformation
Frustrations grew behind the scenes among top leaders on both sides, potentially hurting the government’s efforts to overcome the pandemic.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Cecilia Kang | Aug. 10, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/facebook-vaccine-misinformation.ht...

As with many things, people on these platforms who spew garbage are worth ignoring.
People who have concerns about being vaccinated are well worth listening to. 3/
People with anti-vax messages on SM have more in common with people who spread political misinformation than they do with people who have real concerns about vaccines.
Those commonalities are a bit of a tell. 4/

I won’t share the prototypical propaganda messages but they have a lot in common with other propaganda:
-They manipulate data & graphs or make up data
-They take advantage of algorithms by using key words like needle & infertile 5/

-They appear to be pro vaccine & create unproven anecdotes of side effects (One tell is “I am not anti-vax but…)
-They use “it makes you think” type logic. (“Nine people in the hospital with tremors. Makes you think”) 6/

-Because the mission is only to plant doubt among people already unsure or who have questions, they aim to “just clear the bar” so they avoid radical sounding claims
-They tap into pre-existing beliefs about government tyranny & pharma profits to suggest motives 7/

-They are expert at staying on the line of the kind of message that makes it hard for FB or Twitter to take down by avoiding key words, by making up personal experiences, by adding opinion words & if they’re really targeted, they use code words.
8/

-They coordinate campaigns (often on WhatsApp) so that people feel like they are seeing a swarm of different data on the same topic. 9/

These are the exact same techniques used pre- and post-election. It’s a playbook of manipulation, not people who have serious doubts.

If you told me 90% of the major anti-vax messengers had all gotten safely vaccinated themselves, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. 10/

Many are American generated but tap into Russian networks to spread their posts. We used to call that kind of thing collaboration. 11/

Fortunately that behavior doesn’t represent the people who aren’t vaccinated.
However, it does work. 2/3 of those who haven’t been vaccinated believe one of 5 lies about the vaccine. Social media is the most frequent source of that info. 12/

People who aren’t vaccinated largely speaking fall into 2 categories:
-One, they have questions or concerns about the vaccine
-Two, they aren’t paying much attention or aren’t motivated one way or another
And there is a lot of variability within those groups 13/

We believed in the WH & I believe that it’s important to accept whatever questions people have as legitimate & serious concerns even when they’re based on falsehoods they picked up. 14/

In category 1, many of these people are routinely vaccinated & vaccinate their kids. Their questions are about the COVID vaccine.
Commonly— Long term side effects? Impact on fertility? Rushed process? Change your DNA? Cause COVID? 15/

People who are vaccinated or unvaccinated cluster in communities. So they know people with the same questions. Many don’t have a regular doctor to ask questions to. Rumors spread easily. 16/

Sometimes these are just low level concerns. They are in the “I’d rather not” category & when cases dropped this spring, any of these concerns exceeded the risk they felt from COVID.
With Delta, a number of them are rethinking. FDA approval next week will move even more. 17/

It’s safe to say at a minimum this group— who skew non-college educated, skew white (& yes Republican)— doesn’t trust messages from the government. Local voices matter more— employers, doctors, clergy, small business. Many don’t trust the health care system, incl POC & nurses!18/

The other group generally speaking doesn’t see COVID as much of a threat.
Only 40% of those 18-25 have been vaccinated. Above 25, close to 3 in 4 have. 19/

Much of this group say they would get vaccinated if required by school or jobs. Some who work hourly jobs don’t have easy enough access. 20/

We should have all kinds of time to understand these groups & help them get their questions answered. Antagonizing or shaming people isn’t a great way to treat people & it doesn’t abate the propaganda, it actually aids it. 21/

It’s also important that while they’ve chosen to remain unvaccinated, we protect ppl who can’t be inoculated.
I’ve had to show my vax card or a negative test 3 times this week (in California) & if unvaxxed people aren’t thrilled, that’s OK. 22/

About 25 million people say they would get vaxxed if work, school or venues required it. They are looking for the nudge to settle their uncertainty.
Others of course will strenuously object. A reasonable discourse on this question would be better than more SM fights.23/

People are getting increasingly pushed into camps. Pro or anti— but that’s not how most people approach a complex question like this.
But it serves the social media propagandists well. 24/

The SM platforms are as usual the last to address the problem. They empower those out to do harm.
But those who want to reduce the toll of the pandemic should ignore, not enable these trolls & try to get back to the things we do IRL like listening & talking to each other. /end

So Mr. Valentine mentioned in #37 has gone from an is to a was in his wikipedia entry and is now (having written 3 books) another candidate for Written in Stone--the literary cemetery. He was a vaccine skeptic who repurposed the Beatles Taxman into Vaxman. He came down with covid on July 11th and joked then that he was doing his patriotic duty to get the country to herd immunity and a couple days later on Facebook told his friends/followers that they needed to have a plan if they got covid. His plan as he told them was keep an eye on your D3 levels and have a doctor on speed dial to prescribe ivermectin. The last month of his life was pretty much in a hospital bed and on a ventilator. Quite obviously what he really needed was a much better plan. His brother Mark said he regretted telling people what he did. That he worried that many of his listeners would do exactly what he had done and some of them probably have or probably will.

Here’s a Terrible New Idea: Making the Unvaccinated Pay Higher Insurance Premiums
It may seem like a logical—even necessary—step to boost rates, but it would undermine many important health care reforms.
Natalie Shure/August 16, 2021

...It’s callous and not likely to work. Moreover, it threatens to undermine what little popular and political progress we’ve made toward universal health care.

One of the most damaging ideological underpinnings of our market-based health care system is that patients are responsible for their own care, as consumers of commodities.

...threatening to revoke access to health care as punishment for not getting a shot is not merely counterproductive: It’s obscene. Health care is a right and it’s high time we treated it like one.

https://newrepublic.com/article/163276/unvaccinated-pay-higher-insurance-premium...

>43 margd: Health care is a right and it’s high time we treated it like one.

Sounds to me like a good argument for free health care for everybody. But if the USA insists on having health insurance which individuals have to pay for, surely it's a normal part of that free market insurance system that those at higher risk pay higher premiums?

> 44 Taxes or insurance premium, we who are lucky enough to afford it, all pay. But with ACA, US was making progress toward insuring everybody gets the care they need, not what they can afford or deserve. Riding outrage at anti-vaxxers to charge the unvaxxed is a slippery slope to charging addicted, obese, tobacco users, etc. more for their treatment. (Already more than we do.) Also, makes it more likely that they won't seek care early on, which is more expensive in long run. Yes to 'free' health care for everyone, in that there is

(While my middle class son will be paying $$$$ even with health insurance for his son's birth and treatment, I've been happily surprised to learn how much my state pays for very expensive care of moms & babies born with / under really bad conditions. Didn't know about that. At least three cases, so far, for whom it would be easy to say 'too expensive'.)

#45–If we’re going to have corporate insurers running our health care system and the ACA is all about that I don’t see a good reason why they wouldn’t raise the rates of those who refuse to be vaccinated in the middle of a health care crisis that has killed over 600,000 people in this country and has hospitalized millions some for very lengthy periods of time. I can’t see a good reason why either a hospital wouldn’t bill as much as possible those who refused to vaccinate for saving their lives in their hospital stays. It’s not like people don’t have a choice.

>46 lriley:

Precisely. Obviously it would be better to have a socialised health system which is free at the point of delivery as happens in most other nations in the Global North, but the USA has chosen the private insurance model for its health system, so there are profit-based considerations which go with it. Insurers, whether they are insuring motor vehicles, health or anything else, set the premium based on their assessment of the risk. People who take part in risky behaviour pay higher premiums. As you say, they have the choice not to take those risks. I have private health insurance in Kenya and my annual premium increased when I passed the age of 65, not because of any choice I made, but simply because older people are viewed as a higher health risk than younger ones. It's not a new thing for health insurers to charge more for people they consider to be a higher risk. People who choose not to be vaccinated may legitimately be viewed as a higher risk to the insurer.

#47–there are a lot of people on the right who not only are adamantly opposed to getting vaccinated but also opposed to any kind of universal health care system proposal of any kind and more than happy to exclude the poor altogether. Many of these same people have been doing all kinds of covid and vaccine denying—some of them would rather spend $20 to poison themselves with horse paste than get the free covid vaccine shots but they run to the hospital when they can’t breathe anymore. They don’t trust the doctors on covid but they still expect the doctors to save their stupid sorry asses if they get sick with it and down south they’re taking all the hospital beds and ICU beds away from people who might need them for other reasons. Stop pandering to these assholes. Freedumb should come at a price.

#48 Freedumb should come at a price.

I support govt and business actions that protect the rest of us and push the unvaxxed (vaxx and mask mandates) and actions to influence states (conference boycotts, recall), but not that which withhold care--and charging more for health insurance has effect of withholding care. It also increases likelihood that infected people will not isolate putting us all at risk, I suspect?

Extreme triage strategies, which I hope we never need, may withhold care, though...

Many of the unvaxxed have been exposed to more misinformation than access, and anti-vaxxer mindset can be difficult to escape, 'tho redemption is always possible, even if it takes brush with death?

(Full disclosure: a few of my extended family are vaccine-hesitant or even anti (2nd tier). None ill yet... US and Canada)

#49–right now the infected people most all of whom wouldn’t vaccinate in Florida, Texas and elsewhere have taken all the hospital beds away from cancer, stroke and car accident and etc. victims. Their needing treatment is fucking over all those people. There’s no good solution other than getting these idiots to vaccinate.

>50 lriley: True.

Did NBC Report Vaccinated People Have Higher Levels of SARS-CoV-2?
Memes claimed that vaccinated people were therefore contributing to the mid-summer COVID-19 surge.
Madison Dapcevich | 23 August 2021

Claim
NBC reported that vaccinated individuals have higher levels of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, and were therefore contributing to the summer 2021 surge in cases.

Rating
Mixture

About this rating
What's True
The text shared in a now-viral meme was authentic and did, in fact, come from a CNBC report published on July 27, 2021. It was also true that preliminary data suggest that vaccinated individuals carry high levels of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
What's False
However, the quote itself was taken out of context to suggest that vaccines are ineffective. The widely shared screenshot of the article failed to include the rest of the article, which said that, "Federal health officials still believe fully vaccinated individuals represent a very small amount of transmission."...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nbc-report-vaccinated-sars/

Fact check below contains some useful stats on status of US hospitals during early Delta wave.

Hospitals Overwhelmed by Another Surge of COVID-19 Patients, Financial Strain
Sean Carlin | August 18, 2021

SciCheck Digest
The seven-day average of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. has increased by 322% in two months, straining the ability of medical staff in some states to care for patients. Despite the rising numbers, an Instagram post questioned whether COVID-19 is “truly a pandemic that was ‘overwhelming hospitals,'” if hospitals are firing nurses who refuse to be vaccinated.

Full Story
The latest surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., driven by the delta variant of the virus that causes the disease, has pushed up the seven-day average of COVID-19 hospitalizations from 19,123 on June 15 to 80,664 on Aug. 15 — an increase of 322%.

The hospitalizations tend to be higher in states with low vaccination rates, including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

But a misleading Instagram post questions the seriousness of the pandemic and its effect on hospitals. “If there were truly a pandemic that was ‘overwhelming hospitals,’ then hospitals wouldn’t be laying off thousands of nurses who refuse to take an experimental vaccine,” the post reads.

While some hospital staff have been fired for refusing to get the vaccine — notably at hospitals in Houston and New Jersey — the overall number dismissed for that reason is likely to be very small at this point, Colin Milligan, a spokesman for the American Hospital Association, told us in an email...

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/scicheck-hospitals-overwhelmed-by-another-surg...

Did Tucker Carlson Say This About Nebraska Man’s Death to Stoke COVID Vaccine Fears?
The claim appeared to stem from former U.S. Democratic Sen. Al Franken, who hasn't yet returned our request for comment.
Jessica Lee | 23 August 2021

Claim
On Aug. 13, 2021, Fox News' Tucker Carlson on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" said a 47-year-old man from Kearney, Nebraska, died 12 hours after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, when, in reality, the man died in a train-vehicle collision.

Rating
False...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tucker-carlson-nebraska-man-covid/

Eric Topol (Scripps MD scientist) @EricTopol | 9:24 PM · Aug 23, 2021:

A reminder about Ivermectin, the anti-parasite pill that in Mississippi accounts for 70% of recent calls to its poison control center
https://npr.org/2021/08/23/1030208101/mississippi-livestock-drug-ivermectin-covi...

The main study supporting its use had to be withdrawn due to "plagiarism and data manipulation"
Image-text Mississippi poison ( https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1429977888967729170/photo/1 )
Image-text flawed preprint ( https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1429977888967729170/photo/2 )

NEWS
Flawed ivermectin preprint highlights challenges of COVID drug studies
The study’s withdrawal from a preprint platform deals a blow to the anti-parasite drug’s chances as a COVID treatment, researchers say.
Sara Reardon | 02 August 2021
https://nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02081-w

https://www.mediaite.com/news/black-americans-lead-whites-in-getting-vaccinated-...
Black Americans Lead Whites in Getting Vaccinated By Double Digits in New Poll

The lowest self-reported rate of vaccinations was among respondents who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. Only 50 percent of those Trump voters say they have been vaccinated.

In other words ~ The Trump cult is a death cult full of lunatics.

Vaccinated people are not 'creating' coronavirus variants
Claire Savage | 24 August 2021 at 10:58

Social media posts claim Covid-19 vaccines lead to virus mutations and say vaccinated people are responsible for variants, citing the case of a different disease that affects chickens as evidence. But experts say the analogy is flawed, and that vaccines reduce rather than enhance the risks posed by Covid-19.

"It is the vaccinated NOT the unvaccinated spreading the mutant variants... This is what has happened with numerous other 'leaky' (non-neutralizing) vaccines. The classic example of this is Marek's disease in chickens," says text attributed to "Janci Lindsay, Ph.D." in an August 7, 2021 Facebook post.

"So please spare me the propaganda that the unvaccinated are the ones 'causing' this because they are not and there is a clearly defined mechanistic pathway for how the vaccinated are creating the mutants," says the text in an image featured in the post.

An August 8 tweet links to an article headlined "Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve" and says: "This was published before COVID-19 had hit, yet it hits the mark on how the COVID vaccination campaign could be driving the emergence of resistant variants of SARS-CoV-2."

...The article is based on a study about Marek's disease in chickens -- the case mentioned in the social media posts attributed to Lindsay.

Published in PLOS Biology in July 2015, the study led by Pennsylvania State University biology professor Andrew Read found that "anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts."

It analyzed Marek's disease in poultry, which has plagued the agricultural industry for decades. The study found that for this disease and vaccine, immunization which stops serious illness but fails to stop the spread of disease can enhance "the fitness of more virulent strains" in the flock.

The study said this is often called a "leaky" vaccine. However, the posts attributed to Lindsay extrapolate the logic to apply to the today's Covid-19 vaccines and variants.

Read told AFP that this comparison is "irresponsible."

The study deals with chickens, not humans, and a herpes virus, not a coronavirus.

"Covid involves very different vaccines and viruses, and the biological details matter," Read said...

https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252F9L24VY-1

Why It Took So Long to Develop a New Vaccine for Lyme Disease
Initially halted by public fears, a preventive treatment could be here in two years.
Sue Halpern | August 19, 2021

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-medicine/the-two-decade-delay-in-lym...

Regeneron

FDA authorizes REGEN-COV monoclonal antibody therapy for post-exposure prophylaxis (prevention) for COVID-19
Prophylaxis with REGEN-COV is not a substitute for vaccination against COVID-19
Aug 10, 2021

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today revised the emergency use authorization (EUA) for REGEN-COV (casirivimab and imdevimab, administered together) authorizing REGEN-COV for emergency use as post-exposure prophylaxis (prevention) for COVID-19 in adults and pediatric individuals (12 years of age and older weighing at least 40 kg) who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death. REGEN-COV is not authorized for pre-exposure prophylaxis to prevent COVID-19 before being exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus -- only after exposure to the virus. Health care providers should review the Fact Sheet for detailed information about the use of REGEN-COV for post-exposure prophylaxis.

REGEN-COV also remains authorized for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients (12 years of age and older weighing at least 40 kg) with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 viral testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death.

Prophylaxis with REGEN-COV is not a substitute for vaccination against COVID-19. FDA has authorized three vaccines to prevent COVID-19 and serious clinical outcomes caused by COVID-19, including hospitalization and death. FDA urges you to get vaccinated, if you are eligible. Learn more about FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines.

REGEN-COV may only be used as post-exposure prophylaxis for adults and pediatric individuals (12 years of age and older weighing at least 40 kg) who are:

at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death, and

not fully vaccinated or who are not expected to mount an adequate immune response to complete SARS-CoV-2 vaccination (for example, people with immunocompromising conditions, including those taking immunosuppressive medications), and

have been exposed to an individual infected with SARS-CoV-2 consistent with close contact criteria per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), or

who are at high risk of exposure to an individual infected with SARS-CoV-2 because of occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in other individuals in the same institutional setting (for example, nursing homes or prisons)

In general, people are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after their second dose in a two-dose series (the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines) or two weeks after a single-dose vaccine (the Janssen vaccine).

The CDC defines close contact as someone who has been within six feet of an infected person (laboratory-confirmed or a clinically compatible illness) for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period.

People should talk to their health care provider about whether the use of REGEN-COV for post-exposure prophylaxis is appropriate for them.

The primary data supporting the EUA reissuance for post-exposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 are from a Phase 3 trial. The trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial studying a single dose of REGEN-COV for prevention of COVID-19 in household contacts of individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Cases were confirmed using real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), one of the most accurate laboratory methods for detecting, tracking, and studying COVID-19. An 81% reduction in confirmed symptomatic COVID-19 cases was observed with REGEN-COV compared to placebo at day 29 in cases who were RT-PCR negative and seronegative at baseline (the primary analysis population). In the overall trial population, there was a 62% reduction in RT-PCR confirmed symptomatic COVID-19 cases in the REGEN-COV group compared to placebo at day 29.

The most common side effects were injection site reactions. The signs and symptoms of injection site reactions which occurred in at least 1% of subjects in the REGEN-COV group were skin redness (erythema), an uncomfortable, irritating sensation that creates an urge to scratch (pruritus), and ecchymosis (discoloration of the skin resulting from bleeding underneath, caused by bruising). There were no cases of severe hypersensitivity reactions, or potentially life-threatening allergic reactions (such as anaphylaxis).

People who had a previous severe allergic reaction to REGEN-COV should not use it again. Other important information for these trials including other outcomes and side effect information is available in the health care provider fact sheet.

REGEN-COV consists of the monoclonal antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab, administered together. Monoclonal antibodies are laboratory-made proteins that mimic the immune system’s ability to fight off harmful pathogens, such as viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

The authorized dose for REGEN-COV for both treatment and as post-exposure prophylaxis is 600 mg of casirivimab and 600 mg of imdevimab administered together.

For treatment, intravenous infusion is strongly recommended; subcutaneous (under the skin) injection is authorized as an alternative route of administration when intravenous infusion is not feasible and would lead to delay in treatment.

For post-exposure prophylaxis, either intravenous infusion or subcutaneous injection is appropriate. For individuals who remain at high risk of exposure to another individual with SARS-CoV-2 for longer than 4 weeks, and who are not expected to mount an adequate immune response to full SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, following an initial dose of 600 mg of casirivimab and 600 mg of imdevimab, repeat doses of 300 mg of casirivimab and 300 mg of imdevimab once every 4 weeks are appropriate for the duration of ongoing exposure...

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-authorizes-regen-cov-...

Short hospitalizations hit hard for COVID patients
Study hints at long-term health and financial impacts.
Jacob Dwyer, Michigan Medicine | Aug 19, 2021

...Preliminary analysis finds that close to 85% of people hospitalized for COVID said that they were not back to their pre-COVID lives one month later. And these problems don’t appear to be a consequence of age or previous health status—the people surveyed were an average age of 60 years old and in relatively good health before their bouts with COVID-19.

Most had a new or worse cardiopulmonary symptom...Almost half of the patients surveyed reported a new disability that prevented them from doing activities of daily living one month later.

“This isn’t patients saying, ‘I can’t run quite as far as I used to’. This is them saying ‘I can’t walk, I can’t cook, I can’t shower’. The effects are devastating,” said co-lead author C. Terri Hough, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Oregon Health & Science University. ...

The average patient included in the study was only hospitalized for five days, and half for less than that. While longer hospitalizations were associated with even more disability and symptoms, problems were present even among those with only short stays, even among the young.

On top of the physical impacts of a hospital stay, the financial fallout was widespread. Twenty-three percent of patients said they had used up their savings, 20% had to either change their job or became unemployed, and close to 40% required a loved one to miss work to provide care.

...“While much attention has focused on deaths from COVID, these findings highlight the long-term consequences in survivors of COVID-19 and shed light on the public health crisis resulting from the disability and economic loss among COVID survivors,” said James P. Kiley, Ph.D., director of NHLBI’s Division of Lung Diseases...

https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/short-hospitalizations-hit-hard-for-covid-...
https://michmed.org/pxGLO

----------------------------------------------------

Theodore J Iwashyna et al. 2021. Continuing Cardiopulmonary Symptoms, Disability, and Financial Toxicity One Month After Hospitalization for 3rd Wave COVID-19: Early Results from a U.S. Nationwide Cohort. Journal of Hospital Medicine. (Aug 18, 2021. DOI: 10.12788/jhm.3660 https://www.journalofhospitalmedicine.com/jhospmed/article/244270/hospital-medic...

Abstract
BACKGROUND: Patients discharged after COVID-19 report ongoing needs.

OBJECTIVES: To measure incident symptoms after COVID-19 hospitalization.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Preplanned early look at 1-month follow-up surveys from patients hospitalized August 2020 to January 2021 in NHLBI PETAL Network’s Biology and Longitudinal Epidemiology: COVID-19 Observational (BLUE CORAL) study. English- or Spanish-speaking hospitalized adults without substantial pre-COVID-19 disability with a positive molecular test for SARS-CoV-2.

RESULTS: Overall, 253 patients were hospitalized for a median of 5 days (interquartile range IQR, 3-8), and had a median age of 60 years (IQR, 45-68). By race/ethnicity, 136 (53.8%) were non-Hispanic White, 23 (9.1%) were non-Hispanic Black, and 83 (32.8%) were Hispanic. Most (139 54.9%) reported a new or worsened cardiopulmonary symptom, and 16% (n = 39) reported new or increased oxygen use; 213 (84.2%) patients reported not feeling fully back to their pre-COVID-19 level of functioning. New limitations in activities of daily living were present in 130 (52.8%) patients. Financial toxicities, including job loss or change (49 19.8%), having a loved one take time off (93 37.8%), and using up one’s savings (58 23.2%), were common. Longer lengths of hospital stay were associated with greater odds of 1-month cardiopulmonary symptoms (adjusted odds ratio aOR, 1.82 per additional week in the hospital; 95% CI, 1.11-2.98) and new disability (aOR, 2.06; 95% CI, 1.21-3.53). There were not uniform demographic patterns of association.

LIMITATIONS: We prioritized patients’ reports of their own incident problems over objective testing.

CONCLUSION: Patients who survived COVID-19 in the United States during late 2020/early 2021 still faced new burdens 1 month after hospital discharge.

Trial suggests malaria sickness could be cut by 70% (BBC)

A new approach to protecting young African children from malaria could reduce deaths and illness from the disease by 70%, a study suggests. Giving them vaccines before the worst season in addition to preventative drugs produced "very striking" results, London researchers say... This trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, focused giving very young children a proven vaccine already in use and anti-malarial drugs at the time of year they are most vulnerable - often the rainy season (from June in Burkina Faso), when mosquitoes multiply...

Fact check: Post about COVID-19 vaccine mandates from government, vaccine companies is partly false
Ella Lee | Aug 25, 2021

The claim: White House, vaccine companies and other agencies are not mandating vaccination

As companies and universities across the country begin mandating vaccination against COVID-19 for their employees and students, some online claim that the government and vaccine manufacturers aren’t taking their own advice.

“If your job is mandating the shot, don’t worry. Here are a few places you can work who do not mandate it,” an Aug. 16 post shared to Instagram reads.

The post lists the White House, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Pfizer, Moderna, the World Health Organization and Johnson & Johnson.

More than 2,700 people have liked the post, which has been duplicated on Instagram. Both Instagram posts originated on Twitter, though it’s unclear who made the claim first, as one account has since been suspended.

The list gets the vaccination requirements of most of the entities wrong. All three vaccine manufacturers have mandated the vaccine for employees, and the White House has created strict guidelines for all federal employees, including CDC and FDA employees, regarding vaccination.

...Most listed entities require vaccination or enforce rules for employees without the shot...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/25/fact-check-post-white-h...

#43 - 51 charging vaxxed more for healthcare, denying hospital services, contd.

Delta Air Lines is raising health insurance premiums for unvaccinated employees by $200 a month to cover higher Covid costs
Leslie Josephs | Aug 25 2021

Starting Nov. 1, unvaccinated Delta employees who have health insurance from the company will face $200 monthly surcharges.

From Sept. 12, unvaccinated employees will have to take a Covid test every week, while “community case rates” are high.

United Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines say they will mandate vaccines for employees...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/delta-air-lines-unvaccinated-employees-will-face...

------------------------------------------------------------

Stated on August 23, 2021 in an Instagram post:
75 doctors in South Florida walked out in protest as their hospital was flooded with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients

No, doctors in South Florida did not walk off the job or protest while patients needed care
Samantha Putterman August 25, 2021

A group of about 75 doctors from multiple hospitals in South Florida held a news conference to encourage community members to get vaccinated and wear masks.

The event was not a protest or a walkout. It took place around 6 a.m., before office hours, and physicians who attended either came before the start of their shifts or after, doctors who participated told PolitiFact. Local hospital officials confirmed there was no delay in patient care...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/aug/25/instagram-posts/no-doctors-sou...

Home Schooling Leads To Home Remedies

Covid: Vaccine complications dwarfed by virus risks (BBC)

A major review of vaccines suggests the AstraZeneca jab does raise the risk of blood clots and another serious condition that can cause bleeding. But the study found the risk of such problems following a coronavirus infection was still much higher. The University of Oxford-led team also found an increased risk of stroke after the Pfizer jab - but again at a much lower rate than after infection. The team said it once again showed the "substantial" benefit of vaccination...

Disregard Anti COVID-19 Vaccine Talks, “Let us shield ourselves”: Tanzanian Archbishop (ACI Africa)

A Catholic Archbishop in Tanzania has cautioned against those campaigning against COVID-19 vaccination program, and urged the people of God in the East African nation to disregard such campaigns... “Disregard talks that create doubt, those who oppose the vaccine,” Archbishop Ruwa’ichi said Tuesday, August 24. The Archbishop of Dar es Salaam went on to invite “those of you who are old enough to be vaccinated to go and be vaccinated... Let us not wait for this illness to hit us. Make good use of the opportunity God has given us to take care of ourselves”...

Worth a read: how Trumpians are manipulating antivaxxers, who think they are resisting manipulation by Big Govt and Big Pharma...

Criminal! Literally! AFLD founder "Dr. Simone Gold, a licensed emergency-room physician and Stanford-educated lawyer who was working as a part-time, independent contractor in a hospital in Bakersfield, Calif...was arrested for participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection."

------------------------------------------------------------

How 'America's Frontline Doctors' Sold Access to Bogus COVID-19 Treatments—and Left Patients in the Lurch
Vera Bergengruen | August 26, 2021

...The ivermectin craze reflects some of the most damaging elements of the post-Trump conservative movement, with a mixture of political profiteering, disinformation, exploitation of social media and conspiratorial thinking combining at a critical point in the pandemic. AFLD (America's Frontline Dostors) has capitalized on “the perfect storm of everything that you needed to have a large population of people susceptible to vaccine misinformation,” says Kolina Koltai, a researcher who studies the anti-vaccine movement at the University of Washington. “America’s Frontline Doctors are really good at what they do. This idea of doctors fighting the system is a narrative that is really appealing to a lot of people.”

‘A coordinated political effort’...

The emergence of AFLD was a coordinated political effort months in the making. The group was the brainchild of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive network of conservative activists. During a May 11 call of CNP members that was leaked to the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group, members complained that Trump was being slammed for his handling of the pandemic, including failing to follow scientific guidelines. The group needed their own medical professionals to promote their message, they said, in the face of data showing two-thirds of Americans were wary of restarting the economy.

...Eight days later, conservative groups publicized a letter signed by more than 500 doctors calling the lockdowns a “mass casualty event.” The lead signatory was Dr. Simone Gold, a licensed emergency-room physician and Stanford-educated lawyer who was working as a part-time, independent contractor in a hospital in Bakersfield, Calif. Ten weeks after the letter’s release, Gold was standing on the steps of the Supreme Court as the founder of AFLD as Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican, thanked the white-coated physicians for coming to “tell us the truth.” The event was hosted and funded by the Tea Party Patriots, a pro-Trump right-wing group...

https://time.com/6092368/americas-frontline-doctors-covid-19-misinformation/
___________________________________________________

ETA :D

Anti vaxxers who take horse dewormer Ivermectin shall hereby be referred to as neighsayers.

- Brett Meiselas (cofounder of MeidasTouch) @BMeiselas | 2:38 AM · Aug 29, 2021

>67 John5918: TANZANIA: Archbishop Ruwai’chi Orders All Priests to be Vaccinated (AMECEA)

Archbishop Most Rev. Jude Thaddaeus Ruwai’chi OFM Cap has ordered all priests in the Dar es Salaam Archdiocese to be vaccinated so as to protect the gift of life given by God. He insisted that God’s will is for everyone to have life and so they should respect His will by protecting their lives...

>49 margd: triage contd.

Would It Be Fair to Treat Vaccinated Covid Patients First?
Last week, Texas health care policymakers discussed taking vaccination status into account for Covid triage.
It’s a larger conversation ethicists are bracing for.
Adam Rogers | 08.23.2021

...Would it make sense to take into account the vaccination status of their Covid patients? With ICUs filling up with severely ill Covid-19 patients and a shortage of beds and nurses, should clinicians (all other things being equal) care for vaccinated people before—or differently than—unvaccinated ones?

Now, that hasn’t happened, and probably won’t.

...triage (is) a complicated medical and ethical issue, but the plainest version is that the most effort goes to the people most likely to survive...

Around the world, hospitals and clinicians have broadly agreed that both Covid and non-Covid patients should have the same triage principles applied, that care shouldn’t be first-come, first-served (because of differences in accessibility), and that the primary metric should be getting the greatest number of people to leave the hospital alive...

One thing ethicists and clinicians have come back to again and again is avoiding “categorical exclusion criteria,” attributes that knock someone out of the triage running...as a team of Swiss ethicists argued last spring, you might distinguish between “first-order criteria,” like demographics, and “second-order criteria,” more subtle stuff that’d only come into play in a tiebreaker—two patients, alike in every possible way, similar prognoses, similar diagnoses. But deciding what differences to take into account is very tricky...

...no one knows if severely ill vaccinated people have better outcomes—more survivability—than severely ill unvaccinated people.

...how would a clinician trying to triage based on vaccination status distinguish among those groups (access etc.), even if they were allowed to?

...people have been lied to by leaders they trusted...age might be better directed at political leaders who are resisting basic public health measures instead of the people suffering as a result.

https://www.wired.com/story/would-it-be-fair-to-treat-vaccinated-covid-patients-...

Completed my second vaccination for Covid on Thursday afternoon. I re-vaccinated per the advice of my stem cell transplant doctor. A county nurse dropped by my house to give me my fourth shot of Pfizer. We talked about a booster which I will be eligible for 28 days from that shot per NYS and she told me she would give me a call. 4 shots no adverse reactions.

>71 lriley: Good news!

:/
https://twitter.com/mackaycartoons/status/1431601916052639745/photo/1

>72 margd:–there are people dying now just because of the unvaccinated. They can’t get the hospital care they need because hospitals in many states and regions of this country are overwhelmed with unvaccinated covid patients. They’ve taken all the beds and/or they’ve driven thousands and thousands of nurses and doctors and other medical staff to quit their jobs out of mental, physical or psychological exhaustion. Those who die from covid die horrific deaths and I absolutely do not intend to add to my own or others misery. A lot of what is happening now is preventable.

Selfish people have no idea what effect their actions have on the world around them. Can't expect FOX or their Facebook connections to clue them in either.

Just had my third Pfizer shot (compromised immune system). Sore arm just like the first two.

>74 mamzel:---a lot of people are finding out too late and it's too late if the person has refused or put if off and now he/she and/or people close to them are in the hospital fighting for air because their lungs are seizing up. This variant has killed a lot more younger individuals many of whom were very fit and without serious health issues. Once it's serious enough that they're keeping you in the hospital it's a roll of the dice.

>75 lriley: Of course I managed to schedule my shot the day after the approval of the Pfizer immunization. Lots of people showed up wanting their first shot. The poor person signing these walk ins tried to get them to take the Moderna so that there were enough Pfizers for the people who made appointments. It took all I had to keep my mouth shut and my blood pressure down. Managed to keep it down to "stink eye".

>76 mamzel: It is good when people are still showing up but yeah I might have had the same reaction as you. The reason I started with Pfizer is that’s what NYS was distributing when I became eligible in February because of my comorbidity. When my transplant doctor told me to get re-vaccinated it’s because they don’t know how much if any is still there. So it’s a good idea for me to stick with Pfizer and everyone was in agreement with that. I’m getting all my other vaccines going back to childhood in late October because again they don’t know how much immunity if any is there.

Johnson & Johnson’s HIV vaccine fails first efficacy trial
Matthew Herper | Aug. 31, 2021

An HIV vaccine using the same basic technology as Johnson & Johnson’s Covid shot failed to prevent infection, the company said Tuesday, dealing yet another blow to efforts to create a vaccine against the virus.

The study, called Imbokodo, enrolled 2,600 women in southern Africa who were at very high risk of HIV infection. J&J and its partners, including the National Institutes of Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, launched the study in 2017 and announced that all participants had received either a vaccine or a placebo last year. The goal of the vaccine was not to completely prevent infection, but to reduce the chance of infection by half.

“If a vaccine is 50% efficacious it can curb the future of the HIV pandemic,” said Paul Stoffels, J&J’s chief scientific officer and, before that, an HIV researcher. He said that the actual efficacy seen was 25.2%, meaning those that received the vaccine had their odds of becoming infected reduced that much compared to the placebo group 24 months after the first dose. That difference was not statistically significant, indicating that it is possible the result is due to chance.

A second study, called Mosaico, that is testing a somewhat different vaccine regimen in men who have sex with men and transgender people in the Americas and Europe, will continue...

https://www.statnews.com/2021/08/31/first-efficacy-trial-of-johnson-johnsons-hiv...

Don’t Want to Get Vaccinated? It Could Cost You.
Jordan Weissmann | Aug 28, 2021

(mandates, healthcare premiums, out-of-pocket costs)

https://slate.com/business/2021/08/delta-vaccine-insurance-hospital-covid.html

Saw a nice poster by the check-out till in a Nairobi supermarket today entitled "six feet". First picture: two people wearing masks separated by 6 feet social distancing, with a big arrow measuring out the distance. Second picture: a body buried in a coffin, with the same big arrow measuring out six feet underground.

>80 John5918: Oof! Message received!

One of my anti-vaxxers was cross that hospital sent a member of her extended family home with a possible brain bleed, to avoid his acquiring virus in hospital. She really doesn't get that it isn't just about protecting herself, but also the community, in this case a family member... She really doesn't believe there is risk from this virus, that it isn't some weird power-conspiracy. :( She did allow that she hoped she was wrong...but I'm not expecting much more. :(

Doctors frustrated with 'selfishness' of unvaccinated people, protesters
Camille Bains | September 3, 2021

Some doctors and nurses are frustrated with large groups of anti-vaccination protesters outside hospitals in cities across (Canada) and say limited health-care resources are being used to save the lives of those who decided not to protect themselves against COVID-19.

...Anti-vaccination sentiments have intensified since some provinces announced plans to require so-called vaccination passports to access places like restaurants, movie theatres and gyms. Quebec and Ontario began their programs this week and British Columbia residents will be expected to provide proof of vaccination in the coming weeks....

... Michael Villeneuve, CEO of the nurses association, said a very small but vocal percentage of nurses, perhaps three per cent, appear to be against vaccination, especially as a condition of employment, but everyone in the profession should know COVID-19 vaccines have been rigorously tested.

...Villeneuve, a registered nurse, said it's not always clear that those protesting against vaccines and claiming to be nurses on social media in particular are actually part of the profession.

..."The frustration is, how do you bring people to see the value of the solution," he said of vaccines. "There are always people who say it's a rights-based response, with no responsibility."

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/doctors-frustrated-with-selfishness-of...

Justin Baragona (The Daily Beast) @justinbaragona | 8:31 PM · Sep 2, 2021:
Tucker Carlson straight up advocates for unvaccinated people to get fake vaccine cards to avoid mandates:

"Buying a fake vaccination card is an act of desperation by decent, law-abiding Americans who have been forced into a corner by tyrants."

1:15 ( https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1433588541745999873 )

3 Pro-Trump, Anti-Vaxx Right Wing Radio Hosts Dead of COVID-19 in Same Month

Will their deaths impact their audiences and influence them to get vaccinated? Probably not. The deaths of fellow travellers is not proving to be sufficient impetus for them to get vaccinated because their shared ideology is more important to them than proven protection from death. Many anti-vaxxers are doubly indemnified by their ideology plus their religious convictions that "god is in control and decides who lives and dies." A combined attitude of self-righteousness and old-fashioned selfishness armors them from influences of statistical evidence and science.

Politics have played a key role in who is and is not getting the shots, as NBC News polling has shown. A recent survey found that just 55 percent of Republicans have been vaccinated, which drops to 50 percent among Trump voters and 46 percent among Republicans who support former President Donald Trump more than the party — each total among the lowest of any demographic group surveyed. In contrast, 91 percent of Biden voters said they have gotten vaccinated. In addition, a Kaiser Family Foundation vaccination tracking poll released last month found that Republicans were the second-least-likely demographic group to be vaccinated.

Anti-vaccine protesters try to storm London offices of medical regulator (Guardian)

Police have prevented anti-vaccine protesters from storming the headquarters of Britain’s medical regulator during violent clashes in east London. At least four officers were injured and arrests were made during a confrontation as hundreds of people gathered outside the offices of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in Canary Wharf... Some of the crowd who had gathered at Canary Wharf were later involved in another confrontation outside the Science Museum vaccination centre in Kensington, west London... The protests are understood to have been organised by activists angered by reports that the Covid-19 vaccination campaign could be extended to younger age groups...

Australien {sic} Honest Government Ad: COVID-19 vaccine (video)

Fake CNN Report On Obese COVID-19 Patient Dying Goes Viral The report on obese woman dying of COVID-19 and blaming unvaccinated people is fake. Follow us on By - AFP | 6 Sep 2021

https://www.boomlive.in/world/fake-news-cnn-article-obese-woman-dying-covid-19-b...

Idaho Activates Crisis Standards of Care for State's Northern Hospitals

"Crisis Standard of Care" is medical speak for health care rationing. It has been invoked because of a severe shortage of staffing and available beds in the northern area of the state caused by a massive increase in patients with COVID-19 who require hospitalization. The crisis status applies to 10 hospitals in two districts. It is used when there are not enough healthcare resources to provide the usual standard of care to people who need it, i.e., not enough oxygen to go around in sufficient quantities for everyone who needs it.

“Crisis standards of care is a last resort. It means we have exhausted our resources to the point that our healthcare systems are unable to provide the treatment and care we expect,” said DHW Director Dave Jeppesen. “This is a decision I was fervently hoping to avoid. The best tools we have to turn this around is for more people to get vaccinated and to wear masks indoors and in outdoor crowded public places. Please choose to get vaccinated as soon as possible – it is your very best protection against being hospitalized from COVID-19.”

When there are insufficient beds and a lack of vital staff in hospitals across the state (8th from the bottom of all 50 states with fully vaccinated adults), a simple immediate solution to the crisis could be effected, I suppose. Post signs that say, "No vaccine. No admittance."

Republicans, welcome the Death Panels of your own making.

Basically the hospitals are at the point where they have to make decisions on who lives and who dies. Good going unvaccinated Idahoans. You’ve proven to everybody that you’re amongst the dopiest dumbasses out there.

As a virologist I’m shocked my work has been hijacked by anti-vaxxers (Guardian)

As a virologist, I’ve spent the past year or more studying the novel coronavirus that has upended all our lives. Communicating our work to the public and speaking to the media is an important part of my job, and I’ve always tried to be clear and accurate about the science: I believe the available vaccines against Covid-19 are safe, and they are our best route back to a more normal way of living.

I’ve been concerned about the anti-vaccination movement since before the pandemic. But I never imagined that my own work could actually be part of their misinformation arsenal. So I was shocked to discover that a recent TV interview I did for ITV London News had been seized on by anti-vax and conspiracy activists and now has thousands of likes, shares and retweets across social media...

But the widely shared versions of the video were often edited, or taken out of context, to make me out to be some sort of supervillain, or the unlikely hero of the anti-vax world... Like the virus itself, the videos seemed to be mutating and spreading, with new, more virulent variants catching on online... Judging by the messages coming into my inbox, there are a lot of people taken in by this. I get tens of notifications a week (even three months later) from people still citing these videos as proof that vaccines don’t work. And I still get direct inquiries from people genuinely worried about the impact of these videos...

Christian Leaders in Nigeria’s Bauchi State Encourage COVID-19 Vaccine amid Low Uptake (ACI Africa)

Christian leaders in Nigeria’s Bauchi State are encouraging the people of God within their pastoral region to take part in the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination exercise amid reported low uptake of the jab. “Avail yourselves to take the vaccination. It is very potent to guard you from the infection,” the chairman of Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Nigeria’s Bauchi State, Rev. Abraham Damina Dimeus, has been quoted as saying Sunday, September 5...

Hawaii Governor Issues Directed Crisis Standard of Care EO

In a first for the state, legal protections to health care facilities and workers who need to cancel or postpone elective surgeries, conserve oxygen or other medical supplies, or implement a “crisis standards” triage framework to allocate care have been issued in anticipation of lawsuits that would likely result from patients who receive sub-standard of care treatment in Hawaii as its hospitals are filling with Covid patients.

Hawaii has more COVID-19 cases now than at any other point in the coronavirus pandemic, hitting an average of more than 900 daily cases reported last week, compared with an average of 40 daily cases in early July. Only 56% of residents have been fully vaccinated so far. Rawstory

The executive order prioritizes COVID-19 patients' treatment over elective procedures, allowing them to be cancelled to free up beds and health care workers to care for the Covid-19 sick. It also directs them to conserve oxygen for use by Covid-19 patients. Importantly, provides immunity to both paid and volunteer personnel and institutions from civil suits as a result of any complication or deaths not due to negligence or mistreatment among the rationed population who are treated while the order is in effect.

There's your health care rationing because of Republican resistance to obeying public health behavioral norms. Not from Obamacare.

LA County Schools MANDATE Vaccine for All Children 12 and Up

In a move to protect children from the ravages of severe COVID-19 that can produce long haul after effects, strokes, and death even in the young, Los Angeles County school board mandated the vaccine for all students aged twelve and older. The vote was unanimous with one abstention by a member of the board who owns stock in Phizer. But he approves the decision.

Immediately after the vote, the board applauded. As sensible people across America did too, I imagine.

Any child who is not vaccinated can receive home schooling. There is no organized religion (not cult) that has a religious stance against vaccination of any kind, but excuses on that basis will be permitted, as well as for physician excused medical reasons. Children who are not vaccinated will not be allowed to attend classes.
_________________________________________________________
Meanwhile, in La-La Land, aka, the CA Gubernatorial Recall Effort. . .

Californians get to choose to keep Democrat (i.e. Sane) Governor Newsome in office while the Republicans' leading candidate is Larry Elder, a right wing talk show host and newly minted pitch man for a "snake oil" product called "Relief Factor."

The concoction is sold as an "alternative" drug-free something or other. It never names what Relief Factor is an alternative to. Booze? Marijuana? Aspirin? It's formulation is not revealed in the ads (but must be on the labeling, I assume, if intended for human consumption. We do know it is made up of two tings -- fish oil and 'botanical ingredients' which might be ragweed and "funny" mushrooms for all the factual information contained in the ad.

When he's not busy being a spokesperson, he has opinions like these.

"I don't believe the science suggests that young people should be vaccinated. I don't believe the science suggests that young people should have to wear masks at school," Elder told CNN's Joe Johns during a wide-ranging interview Monday afternoon in Los Angeles.

Don't try to tell me that Democrats and Republicans are the same!

Larry's qualifications to be governor? Zilch. But, I guess he's OK if you're a Republican

Religious exemptions to vaccine mandates could test 'sincerely held beliefs'
“I don’t think most of this is sincere. I think it’s just a way to get out of having to take a vaccine,” a bioethics professor said.
Phil McCausland | Sept. 5, 2021, 4:30 AM EDT

Religious exemptions could prove to be the latest legal battlefield of the pandemic, as Americans opposed to the coronavirus vaccines try to find ways around employer and government vaccination mandates...

Experts say that the threshold for religious exemptions could come down to proving whether the person attempting to obtain one has “sincerely held beliefs” against getting vaccinated on religious grounds...

One driver for testing sincerity is the fact that no major organized religion objects to the vaccines, and Roman Catholic and other Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders have advised followers to get the shots....

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/religious-exemptions-vaccine-mandates-could...

Robert Gibbs @Robt_Gibbs | 9:06 PM · Sep 9, 2021
Here are the vaccines many already need(ed) just to go school:

Chickenpox
Diphtheria
Hepatitis A&B
Meningitis
Measles
Mumps
Polio
Pneumonia
Rotavirus
Rubella
Tetanus
Whooping Cough

Adding one for COVID doesn’t impact your freedom, it makes us all safer.
-----------------------------------------------------

Peter Hamby @PeterHamby | 6:33 PM · Sep 9, 2021:
Every few days, I'm reminded that
the U.S. military requires service members to get at least ***17 different vaccines***

>95 margd:–I remember in boot camp my entire company walking through a gauntlet of corpsmen/women and getting several shots in each arm at the same time. They didn’t ask anyone whether or not they were vaccinated for anything—they just did it and soldiers, sailors and airmen/women when they get overseas assignments are vaccinated according to whatever dictates of the country they will be going to. That is just part of the deal and these will just be more shots.

That said if you want to get out here is your opportunity and the chance to make yourself the victim if you’re okay living that kind of lie and whether you’ll get an honorable discharge is another question. People who get out on their own volition often get general discharges that turn into honorable discharges after a 6 month period.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-execut...

Ignorance is bliss in the minds of modern-day GOPers. There are no state lines when a pandemic is spreading throughout a landmass on which we ALL live.

>96 lriley: I remember that only too well - single file march in - shots in both arms - just do it - march outside with the orders to run until you get too dizzy or drop - don't worry - you will be just fine. I didn't faint but I sure didn't feel very well for a couple of hours..and the arms were sore for several days.

One side note - when I went in for the Covid shot the nurse started in by assuring me that it wouldn't hurt too much. I looked at her and said, "Please - I was in the service I know what a bunch of shots all at once feels like. There's no way this is going to be anything like that." She just laughed and got on with the business of giving me my shot.

Problems with preprint that sought to link Ivermectin use in Africa (prevent river blindness) with protection against COVID deaths:

Health Nerd (epidemiologist) @GidMK | 1:36 AM · Sep 10, 2021:
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1436201903788998657
This graphic has been passed around a lot by the ivermectin crowd, so I thought I'd very briefly explain why it's quite clearly incorrect 1/10
Image-deaths Ivermectin countries v non-Ivermectin countries, Africa
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1436201903788998657/photo/1

2/10 The graphic is based on this preprint on medrxiv, which appears to make several mistakes that lead to a lack of much meaning in the final outcomes of the analysis
Image--1st p preprint
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1436201907723276297/photo/1

3/10 The basic idea of the paper is to split countries up by their use of ivermectin to treat river blindness, and then compare them based on COVID-19 deaths
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1436201911733002244/photo/1

There are two main issues with this

4/10 The first problem is the exposure data - saying "these countries have been treated for endemic onchocerciasis" doesn't actually make any estimate of how many people took ivermectin in 2020/21

5/10 If you look at scientific publications into onchocerciasis, it looks like ~90million people across Africa used to receive ivermectin yearly for this purpose i.e.
African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control 1995–2015: Model-Estimated Health Impact and Cost
Author Summary In 1995, the World Health Organization launched the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC) with the aim to control morbidity due to the parasitic infectious disease...
https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0002032#s3

5.5/10 However, this mass-distribution of ivermectin for river blindness by the WHO was PHASED OUT IN 2008-2015. There are individual programs ongoing, but it is not correct to use past estimates of endemic disease to classify countries
https://who.int/about/evaluati...
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1436201919253401609/photo/1

6/10 Conversely, the WHO does still assist in distribution of ivermectin under a program to eliminate lymphatic filiariasis

This includes countries labelled "No ivermectin" in the above graphic
https://who.int/publications/i...
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1436201924466937856/photo/1
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1436201924466937856/photo/2

7/10 So the exposure is meaningless - this chart is comparing countries that use ivermectin to...countries that ALSO use ivermectin on a mass scale

But the outcome is wrong too

8/10 We KNOW that the death data in many African countries for COVID-19 is not great. For one thing, some countries simply do not record any COVID-19 deaths (or test for COVID-19 at all)...
Image... https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1436201930456403982/photo/1

9/10 ...for another, scientists in Zambia have PROVEN that the death data there is a drastic undercount. Comparing places is more about who records deaths better than any meaningful attribution of causality https://bmj.com/content/bmj/372/bmj.n334.full.pdf

10/10 To sum up - this graphic (in 1/10) is meaningless. Neither the exposure OR the outcome are correct. Many people in the orange countries received ivermectin, and many more people than recorded in the blue countries likely died of COVID-19
Image

>95 margd:

I've had most of those vaccinations at various times, plus vaccinations for yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, TB and rabies. It's a normal routine part of life. Today I flew from Kenya to South Sudan and I had to present my yellow fever vaccination certificate (aka "vaccine passport") at both airports, as I have done for the past 45 years. I really don't understand what all the sudden anti-vaccine fuss is all about.

UK Covid booster not necessary for all, says Oxford jab scientist Sarah Gilbert (Guardian)

One of the leading scientists behind the Oxford vaccine for Covid-19 has said she does not support a widespread booster jab campaign in the UK as immunity among fully vaccinated people is “lasting well”. Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert, who developed the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, one of the most widely used Covid vaccines in the world, suggested extra doses should be directed to countries with a low rate of vaccination...

>100 John5918: Me, too! I remember all of us lining up ~Gr 5 (public school, NB, Canada) for polio? smallpox? vaccines. Not so many years after polio outbreaks, so nobody sat out opportunity for vaccines that I can recall. I don't recall parental permission slips, but there may have been--more like parents were advised?
________________________________________

>99 margd: Ivermectin, contd.

What is ivermectin, and where did people get the idea it can treat covid?
Allyson Chiu | Sept 10, 2021

What is ivermectin and how is it traditionally used?
Does ivermectin have an effect on covid-19?
What is the difference between human and animal ivermectin?
What are the risks of misusing ivermectin?
How are doctors and health agencies responding?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/09/10/ivermectin-covid-humans/

>102 margd: My memory is that whole families walked to the high school auditorium to receive the oral polio vaccine. The entire community showed up for those traveling vaccination clinics. I vaguely recall also standing in line for the multipronged arm vaccine. Was that smallpox?

horrified anti-vaxxer discovers every american who got vaccine in 19th century now dead.

https://www.theonion.com/horrified-anti-vaxxer-discovers-every-american-who-got-...

>103 2wonderY: Thank goodness for sugar cubes. I was terrified of needles, especially being such a wuss in front of my classmates--scuffling to be last in line in the hallway. Not a pretty sight I'm sure... I think the multi-pronged vaccine WAS smallpox! Our school also administered cod liver oil--by teaspoon(!) at first, then capsules. Milk, too. Headlice checks. They were pretty hands-on!

>105 margd: My mom lined us up in cold weather months and dosed us with a tablespoon of cod liver oil. Yeuck! But it was probably a very sound way to deliver certain vitamins.

https://www.mediaite.com/news/tapper-rips-biden-for-speaking-out-against-the-unv...
Tapper Rips Biden for Speaking Out Against the Unvaxxed: ‘I Don’t Think Scolding is the Approach

Does Tapper not realize that lunatic diehards will continue jerking their fellow Americans around because they are unhappy with their lives in a 21st Century America. They are throwbacks to the 1850s and 1950s. We are lucky that they represent only about 25% of the USA population.

In the past, we could count on religious institutions to lead their flocks in the direction deemed to be the best for the country at large. Sadly, that is no longer the case in some sections of the country.

>107 Molly3028:

Mandating vaccination during a worldwide pandemic which has killed millions is not scolding, IMO. I hope that isn't what Tapper thinks speaking out against scofflaws who endanger so many others because of their political self-rigteousness is what Biden is doing. He's shaming those who should be shamed for lack of humanity. He's letting everyone know that their rights end where others' begin.

News reports note that anger is rising among the vaccinated against the anti-vaxxers for what they regard as the antis' selfishness. There are no religions that have come out against being vaccinated against COVID-19 as a body. There are plenty of crank and off the hard road Bible thumpers who have ranted against them because of their own political beliefs, but not because of scripture. If I'm not mistaken, there's plenty of admonition in the Bible, scolding believers about how to behave in society. Especially to love one's neighbors as one loves. . .well, I can't think of whom at the moment.

FWIW there are a lot of people in the United States who can’t afford health care and/or are skeptical about the ACA which is why still it would have been much better if during the Obama administration that instead of the ACA we would have created a federally run universal health care system. Everyone then would have been in the system from the wealthiest to the poorest.

I know people who haven’t seen a real doctor (sometimes even a real dentist) in 40 fucking years. My oldest brother for instance despite being a financial planner didn’t have health insurance or a doctor or dentist the day (about 3/4 years ago) his wife drove him to the emergency room because he was on the point of collapse because of blood clots. He spent several days in the hospital and the last couple of those days because the hospital wouldn’t discharge him until he got a general practitioner. There are loads of people who ride out their illnesses whether ear infections, the flu or pinkeye. What’s more they’ll continue to go to work with that shit and continue to send their kids to school sick too. This thing that some people can’t afford a $500 problem is a for real thing too and another argument for universal health care.

A good part of the reason 654,000+ Americans are now dead from covid is our health care system being the way it is is ill prepared for a pandemic and has failed us. It is a political failure more than anything. We didn’t go far enough when we had a chance and that allowed an apolitical illiterate who became the 45th president to throw all responsibility to 50 different governors and the result of that was responsibility from some and political gamesmanship and ambition and irresponsibility from others.

Fact check: There is no evidence 45,000 people died from vaccine-related complications
Devon Link | Sept 10. 2021

...On July 19, attorney Thomas Renz filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on behalf of America’s Frontline Doctors – an organization known for spreading misinformation about vaccines and COVID-19 treatments.

In the complaint, Renz described an analysis from an unnamed whistleblower that claimed to find evidence there were actually 45,000 deaths related to COVID-19 vaccines. This finding is based on the whistleblower's alleged expert analysis of unverified data.

Other fact-checkers have investigated Renz's claim and found no evidence to support his inflated death counts. Still, the unsubstantiated claim persists online.

...Our rating: False

We rate FALSE the claim that almost 45,000 people who got the COVID-19 vaccinations died in 72 hours, based on our research. A CDC spokesperson confirmed there have been no reputable reports of widespread deaths tied to the COVID-19 vaccines.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/10/fact-check-no-evidence-...

Vaccine Resisters Seek Religious Exemptions. But What Counts as Religious?
Major denominations are essentially unanimous in their support of the vaccines against Covid-19, but individuals who object are citing their personal faith for support.
Ruth Graham | Sept. 11, 2021

...Exemption requests are testing the boundaries of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for employees who object to work requirements based on religious beliefs that are “sincerely held.”

...the provision defines “religion” broadly. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has specified that religious objections do not have to be recognized by an organized religion and can be beliefs that are new, uncommon or “seem illogical or unreasonable to others.”

They cannot, however, be based only on social or political beliefs. That means employers must try to distinguish between primarily political objections from people who may happen to be religious, and objections that are actually religious at their core.

For many skeptics, resistance tends to be based not on formal teachings from an established faith leader, but an ad hoc blend of online conspiracies and misinformation, conservative media and conversations with like-minded friends and family members.

...(Pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Joshua Williams's) prepandemic research into school immunization requirements suggests that most objections described as religious to vaccines are really a matter of personal — and secular — beliefs. After the state of Vermont removed its vaccine exemption for nonreligious personal beliefs in 2016, the proportion of kindergarten students with a religious exemption shot up from 0.5 percent to 3.7 percent, suggesting that most parents who took advantage of religious exemptions did so only when others were not available..,

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/11/us/covid-vaccine-religion-exemption.html

What would it take for antivaxxers and climate science deniers to ‘wake up’? (Guardian)

Facts are puny against the carapace of denial when people’s sense of self is at stake. However, in the case of Covid deniers, imminent death seems to do the trick...

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/kevin-mccarthy-ridiculed-for-tweeting-no-vacci...
Kevin McCarthy Ridiculed for Tweeting ‘NO VACCINE MANDATES’: ‘If the Coronavirus Had a Twitter Account’

UNBELIEVEABLE ~ GOPers appear to believe it is possible to be pro-Covid and pro-human race at the same exact time!

Meanwhile, Trumpian Death Cult Republicans continue dying and now, cause the death of a n Alabama man seeking admittance to any one of 43 hospitals because of his heart disease. Sadly, unable to find an available ICU bed, he died in his search.

https://www.rawstory.com/anti-vaxxer-dies-2655015573/
https://www.rawstory.com/veronica-wolski/
and
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/13/1036593269/coro...

The Catholic Church in South Sudan today joined the Vatican and many other national Catholic churches in issuing an official statement signed by all the bishops advising people to get vaccinated as well as taking "sensible precautions" such as masks and social distancing. It also specifically advises them not to be misled by fake news and rumours about the vaccines. I believe South Sudan is just getting a new supply of vaccine so hopefully many people will take the opportunity to get vaccinated.

The Catholic bishops of Kenya and South Africa are amongst many who have publicly issued similar statements.

It is my opinion that all church leaders should take up this message so that anti-vaxxers can't use their religion as an excuse.

Fauci Warns Unvaccinated Are Breeding Population for New Variant

Fauci said one of the most important reasons to get an overwhelming number of people vaccinated is to prevent the COVID-19 virus from mutating into new variants as it spreads. The longer an unresistant population remains, the greater the chance for the existing variants to replicate into new mutated forms. And the longer that goes on the greater the probability that any one (or more) of those new variants could be totally resistant to existing vaccines. Unvaccinated populations are responsible for the COVID-19 sub-pandemic and, potentially, will be responsible for increasing the risk that could put the world right back into the position it was in 16 months ago when the pandemic raged, unchecked by any immunized population.

On the MSNBC "Morning Show" today. . .

The pandemic expert (confirmed) that a new “monster” strain could make the delta variant look like child’s play.
(SNIP)
“There’s always a risk of, as you get more circulation of the virus in the community, that you’ll get enough accumulation of new mutations to get a variant substantially different than the ones we’re seeing now.

“You’re vaccinating now to prevent the next mutant coming, the next variant from coming,” Fauci said."

Transnet’s Vaccine Train Visits The Eastern Cape (Railways Africa)

The new train, which will operate simultaneously with the award-winning Transnet Phelophepa I and II trainsets that started operating in 1994, will extend the government’s vaccination efforts to reach communities in remote areas using the company’s vast railway network. Following successful pilots of vaccines being administered through the Phelopepha trains, Transnet has leveraged its expertise in rail to build a nine coach trainset from existing refurbished coaches, configured it to carry and provide safe vaccine storage, as well as to provide a mobile vaccine dispense facility targeting remote communities in close proximity to rail corridors...

In The Fight Against COVID, Health Workers Aren't Immune To Vaccine Misinformation
Deepa Shivaram | September 18, 2021

...27% of of U.S. health care workers who have not been vaccinated against the disease as of July, according to a study by The COVID States Project.

On top of that, other research shows that since the vaccine first became available to health care workers in December 2020, the rate of vaccination among nurses and nursing home aides has been lower than physicians. This may be of particular concern, since nurses and aides have such frequent and close contact with patients.

Data shows health care workers have gotten the COVID-19 vaccine at a higher rate than the general population: 73% versus 64% of non-health care workers.

...David Lazer of Northeastern University, the lead researcher on The COVID States Project report. The attitudes of health care workers toward the COVID-19 vaccine essentially mirror the rest of the country — with those living in rural areas, who are Republican, with less education and income more likely to be vaccine resistant...

Misinformation affects health care workers, too...
Melody Butler, a nurse at Long Island Community Hospital in New York and the executive director of the non-profit Nurses Who Vaccinate, says she has heard from nurses around the country about why they don't want the vaccine.

...The research was done too quickly; it wasn't fully FDA-approved; they already have antibodies from working the front lines of the pandemic or perhaps getting the virus already. Many are concerned about how the vaccine affects fertility.

..."We are seeing the nurses who weren't trained to recognize poorly written studies, they weren't trained to recognize anti-vaccine propaganda," she says. "And it's very convincing. That's what our struggle is in the nursing community."...

Vaccine mandates could push more staff out...

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/18/1037975289/unvaccinated-covid-19-vaccine-refuse-n...

"Lions, and Tigers, and Bears! Oh, My!"

Zoo keepers at the National Zoo in Washington observed decreased appetites, coughing, sneezing and lethargy among several big cats. Six lions, a Sumatran tiger, and two tigers from Siberia have tested positive for Covid-19 and are undergoing treatment.

The sick cats are being treated with anti-inflammatories and anti-nausea medication, as well as antibiotics to ward off pneumonia.

Zoos cross America from San Diego, CA to Maryland, Philadelphia to Atlanta, are vaccinating their wild animals against Covid with newly formulated vaccine.

Zoetis, a veterinary pharmaceutical company, is donating 11,000 doses of the vaccine to about 70 zoos as well as sanctuaries, universities and other animal conservation sites in 27 U.S. states.

While veterinarians recommend that pets NOT be vaccinated, due to the low incidence of COVID-19 in cats and dogs. . .

The company, based in New Jersey, has also provided the same experimental vaccine to mink farmers in Oregon after the state ruled this spring that all farmed mink had to be vaccinated.

The vaccine mandate for minks was initiated after a massive infection among those animals in Denmark necessitated their complete destruction.

So far, no minks have protested the mandate. And, oddly, none have demanded ivermectin instead.

Because animals can serve as a reservoir for corona virus variants, vaccination of susceptible species to prevent infection of humans is good public health policy. As more highly infectious COVID-19 variants mutate, making an environment for their replication "off limits" is the smart thing to do.

Some other species receiving vaccination include:
Bears
Ferrets
Great Apes (gorillas, chimps, orangutans)
Lemurs

'Vaccine Talk' Facebook Group Is A Carefully Moderated Forum For Vaccine Questions
September 18, 20217:54 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday (4 min)

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/18/1038533086/vaccine-talk-facebook-group-is-a-caref...

How Ivermectin Became The New Focus Of The Anti-Vaccine Movement
Pien Huang | September 19, 20219:00 AM ET

...Kitasato Institute researcher Satoshi Omura and the drug company Merck discovered a set of powerful antiparasitic compounds in bacteria from a dirt sample dug up from a seaside golf course near Tokyo.

From that compound, Merck developed medicines that kill a wide range of parasites that plague animals and humans. Ivermectin, introduced in the early 1980s as a drug for livestock, became a blockbuster, making over $1 billion in sales a year. The version of the drug launched for human use cured disfiguring parasitic infections like elephantiasis and river blindness in developing countries. (It eradicated the latter in several countries.)

Omura and William Campbell, his counterpart at Merck, shared a Nobel Prize in 2015 for their discoveries related to the drug...

Considering new uses for a 'wonder drug' ...
Retracted studies and fights over evidence...
A growing national passion for ivermectin ...
The toll of a misplaced faith ...

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/09/19/1038369557/ivermectin-anti-...

David Frum @davidfrum | 2:15 PM · Sep 12, 2021:
https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1437117688250310659
How's the mass civil disobedience campaign against vaccine mandates going?

At United Airlines, 50% of unvaccinated employees have already complied in the first 3 weeks of the 5 week grace period, according to CEO Jack Kirby...

At Delta Airlines, the vaccination rate has risen to 78% in just two weeks since a mandate was imposed, with no resignations, says the company's chief health officer...

Tyson's Food imposed a mandate in August, employee vaccination rate has risen from 45% to 72% - cutting number of unvaccinated workers in half in less than a month...

Yesterday 3M and Qiagen joined ranks of employers that will weekly testing of employees who refuse vaccination...

USA Today reports that a dozen labor law experts agree that employees who lose jobs for refusing vaccination will be ineligible for state unemployment insurance benefits...

AP poll finds that only 21% of Americans oppose vaccine mandates for federal employees...

Only 2% of human-resource professionals surveyed say they have noticed any instances at all of employees quitting rather than be vaccinated...

You know those surveys about police officers threatening mass resignation? This one was based on a response rate under 40% - in other words, a huge over-sampling of the cranks
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-10/survey-many-sdpd-officers-sa...

One of the first in the country was imposed by tax office in Florida's Orange County. Vax rate doubled from 45% to 90%. Only 12 employees quit. And that's FLORIDA...

Here's what it looked like when anti-vax protesters unsuccessfully tried to force the closure of a school in Washington State. A handful of this (30 protesters, https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1437123509784883206/photo/1 )

countered by this ( https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/protestors-defy-judges-injunction-with-act... ) (Note that the pro-vaxxer correctly spelled the always tricky word "harassing")

73 Chicago school bus drivers quit over mandate. They caused a couple of days of chaos, especially for special education kids, but Uber and Lyft have stepped up to close the gap...

Local CBS affiliate built an entire story over one - ONE - unnamed employee who quit her job one - ONE - unnamed hospital in Maryland...

Now over 800 colleges and universities require vaccination of all students and staff...

ETA:
David Frum @davidfrum | 9:58 AM · Sep 21, 2021:
How's that mass civil disobedience to vaccine mandates going? Here's a news story by an Oklahoma City TV station about how 1 (one) unnamed nursing home employee MIGHT quit (but hasn't yet). https://www.news9.com/story/6148d28d93424c0bfe391e62/shawnee-nursing-home-employ...

Do COVID-19 Vaccines Make You Infertile?
Here are the facts behind claims of impotency, placenta issues, and swollen testicles.
Jessica Lee | 18 September 2021

Claim
COVID-19 vaccines threaten people's fertility, no matter their type of reproductive systems.

Rating
False...

On Sept. 13, 2021, rapper Nicki Minaj told her roughly 23 million Twitter followers that she knew of someone who supposedly got vaccinated against COVID-19 and then became impotent with swollen testicles....

(1) No, Vaccines Don’t Impact Chances of Pregnancy...

(2) Yes, Some Vaccine Recipients Have Reported Period Problems
Meanwhile, it was true that tens of thousands of people reported changes to their period cycle or unexpected bleeding after receiving COVID-19 vaccinations as reported by reputable news outlets, including the BBC.

However, there was no evidence to link those menstrual changes to the vaccine recipients’ fertility. Rather, the possible side effect appeared to be physical proof of how people’s immune systems responses were responding to the vaccines — much like how some people have experienced a fever, chills, or headache after the shots.

Additionally, as Male wrote in the British Medical Journal*, most people who reported the possible side effect said it was temporary and their cycles returned to normal the following month...

Male and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) were calling for more research into the potential connection between menstrual changes and the vaccinations.

While the possible side effect was largely “short-lived” and unrelated to fertility, Male wrote, understanding its full scope could help alleviate concerns among young women who falsely believe that the vaccinations could hurt their chances of future pregnancy.

“Failing to thoroughly investigate reports of menstrual changes after vaccination is likely to fuel these fears,” Male stated.

(3) Pregnant? Experts Say COVID-19 Infection More Dangerous Than Vaccines...

(4) No, Vaccines Don’t Cause Erectile Dysfunction, Swollen Testicles...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covid-vaccine-infertility/
-----------------------------------------------------------------

* Menstrual changes after covid-19 vaccination (Editorial). BMJ 2021; 374 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2211 (Published 16 September 2021) Cite this as: BMJ 2021;374:n2211 https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2211

Interesting twist.

Brett Kelman @BrettKelman | 10:05 PM · Sep 20, 2021:
https://twitter.com/BrettKelman/status/1440140175141576713
The Tennessee state government now recommends vaccinated residents be denied access to monoclonal antibody treatment to preserve supplies for those who are unwilling to get vaccinated and remain most vulnerable by their own choice. A new story from me:

(PAYWALL) Tennessee recommends vaccinated residents lose access to monoclonal antibody treatment
Tennessee health officials recommend medical providers no longer provide monoclonal antibodies to vaccinated residents to preserve supply for the unvaccinated.
tennessean.com

This new recommendation is a result of the feds capping supplies of antibody drugs. They did it because a few poorly-vaccinated southern states, including Tennessee, were using most the nation's supply.
Who loses out as a result? The vaccinated.

To be clear, the state's recommendation is based on guidelines from the National Institutes of Health. A Vanderbilt expert told me this is the right choice to do the most good in a bad situation.
I think the salient question is this: Could we have avoided this bad situation?
---------------------------------------------------

Anne Bonny @JulsOtter | 3:21 AM · Sep 21, 2021:
No, it's NOT "the right choice". Medical triage involves grading patients on their survivability, and vaccinated people have a better chance to survive than unvaxxed. In fact, delivering a scarce treatment to someone whose prognosis is poor is the opposite of an ethical decision

>125 margd: I don’t understand why anti-vaxxers haven’t been required to sign a waiver of treatment in lieu of the shots.

I really liked the suggestion that those who are not vaccinated have to pay more for health and life insurance just like smokers. The evidence is there that what they do is bad for their health and they choose to ignore it.

Kind of interesting that as under Trump (PPE), Biden is distributing vaccines and antibody treatments by state (relative population?), not giving Michigan more vaxx in our time of need nor southern states more antibodies in theirs (>125 margd:). I suppose it couldn't be handled any other way, but each gets fair share, use it or no? (I suppose states can and do share.)

>129 margd: LA Times reports that monoclonal antibodies are hard to get in CA, so maybe not distributed by population(?). Below, feds foot the bill, but "70 percent of the orders for monoclonal antibodies in recent weeks have come from seven Southern states". Maybe feds balked at some of these orders in recent days? >125 margd:

Covid vaccines are less popular than monoclonal antibodies in some places. Here's why.
Vaccines code as "liberal" to many on the far right while monoclonal antibodies treatment does not.
Zeeshan Aleem | Sept. 21, 2021

...About 70 percent of the orders for monoclonal antibodies in recent weeks have come from seven Southern states, six of which rank in the bottom 10 for vaccinations.

...drawbacks to them: The cost is about a hundred times that of a vaccine, which puts a much greater financial burden on the federal government, which is footing the bill, and they’re far more difficult to administer. An infusion takes about 90 minutes when one factors in time for monitoring afterward, which means people requesting them take up sustained staff attention and significant space in already crowded and overburdened hospitals. And medical experts have cautioned that monoclonal antibodies can’t substitute for the vaccines because they’re not as durable and because they’re effective for only a certain window of time after symptoms appear.

...the drug has managed to avoid the taint of the culture wars.

...Trump championed them as a “miracle” cure

...In an evidence-based scenario, vaccines would universally be considered a first line of defense and monoclonal antibodies would serve as a backup. Unfortunately we’re far from such a scenario — a significant proportion of people are, because of a blinkered and hyper-individualistic worldview, inclined to prioritize a reckless and selfish approach that will only prolong our crisis.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/covid-vaccines-are-less-popular-monoclonal-antibod...

>127 mamzel: I really liked the suggestion that those who are not vaccinated have to pay more for health and life insurance just like smokers

Is there any evidence that this has had any effect on smokers' behavior, or is it just a punitive measure? My impression is that it hasn't, but I haven't done any research into the question, would love to know more.

Don't get me wrong, I guess punitive measures are okay if you're into that sort of thing, but it seems to me that changing behavior - getting more people vaccinated - is the ball that we need to keep our eyes on, and punitive measures overall don't seem to be that good at changing behavior. (thinking about the study that showed that charging fees for parents who picked up their kids late from day care actually increased late pickups, for example)

If we want to change behavior, it seems to me that the bands who have written vaccination requirements into their contract riders might end up being the real heroes in this story.

An Arkansas hospital is calling out people who don't want the vax over the use of fetal cells.

https://www.kark.com/news/health/coronavirus/arkansas-hospital-lets-staff-seek-v...

>129 margd: The vaccines are there to keep you from getting sick. Yes there are breakthrough cases. Vaccines are not 100%. Still most vaccinated if they do get sick do not get very sick.

To be eligible for the monoclonal antibody treatment you have to get covid. So basically an unvaccinated person has decided to do nothing about prevention but still wants the cure. In cases where the person is very sick they also better not put off going to the hospital or a clinic. The longer the bad cases take to get help the worse the outcomes. If a person needs oxygen by the time they seek help right off for instance it's really too late already for the monoclonal antibodies to help them.

The clinical trial by the way that I'm taking part in right now is about seeing if the monoclonal antibody daratumamab which is part of the treatment for multiple myeloma before stem cell bone marrow transplant will be beneficial to multiple myeloma patients after transplant. I started this treatment plan a few weeks ago and on Thursday I'll be in Rochester to get my weekly shot. By the way I got 5 and a half hour infusions before the transplant. I'm getting shots now. For those getting the antibodies for covid it's about an hour and a half infusion.

>130 kiparsky:

As far as I understand it, higher insurance premiums are not punitive as such, they simply represent the risk that the insurer believes they are carrying. Someone who does paragliding as a hobby is likely to pay a higher life insurance premium than someone whose hobby is golf. Older people pay higher private health insurance than younger ones - my premium went up when I passed 65. Young men pay a much higher car insurance premium than middle aged people, as do people who drive a high-performance sports car rather than a family saloon. All of this is based on their calculations of how they will continue to make a profit, balancing the level of their income from premiums with the level of their expenditure on insurance claims such as hospitalisation or car crashes.

Obviously it's a dysfunctional capitalist system, but as long as there is no political will to institute a proper national health service which is free to everyone at the point of delivery, it's what one is stuck with.

COVID-19: The Unvaccinated Pose a Risk to the Vaccinated
D'Angelo Gore | September 21, 2021

Q: How do people who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19 pose a risk to people who have been vaccinated?

A: An unvaccinated person who is infected with COVID-19 poses a much greater risk to others who are also unvaccinated. But vaccines are not 100% effective, so there is a chance that an unvaccinated person could infect a vaccinated person — particularly the vulnerable, such as elderly and immunocompromised individuals.

FULL QUESTION
How can the unvaccinated possibly pose a threat to the vaccinated? How does that work? What is the risk exactly? ( Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show on Sept. 13, 2021 )

FULL ANSWER...

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/09/covid-19-the-unvaccinated-pose-a-risk-to-the-v...

Sounds like US is distributing monoclonal antibodies to states based on # cases--not population--and states, rather than hospitals, must determine who receives? Must be some cap by state, else why would Republican governors of Florida, Mississippi and Texas protest?

HHS Announces State/territory-coordinated Distribution System for Monoclonal Antibody Therapeutics
HHS | September 13, 2021

As of Monday, September 13, 2021:
Administration sites no longer order directly from AmerisourceBergen.

Weekly distribution amounts for each state/territory will be determined by HHS based on weekly reports of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in addition to data on inventories and use submitted to the federal government.

State/Territorial Health Departments will determine where product goes in their jurisdictions.

https://www.phe.gov/emergency/events/COVID19/investigation-MCM/Bamlanivimab-etes...
___________________________________________

Tennessee says vaccinated people should be last in line for antibody treatments to save them for the unvaccinated
Aria Bendix | 9/21/2021

...the drugs are in short supply in Tennessee and across the US as the Delta variant continues to spread in states with low vaccination rates. In Tennessee, where just 44% of the population is fully vaccinated, COVID-19 cases still hover above 5,000 per day.

...As of September 13, the federal government has been determining how many monoclonal antibody treatments each state will get based on that state's COVID-19 case count and how much supply it uses up each week. The government announced last week that hospitals can no longer order monoclonal antibodies directly from a wholesale supplier, AmerisourceBergen, due to shortages.

So Tennessee is asking healthcare workers to prioritize the most vulnerable — namely, unvaccinated, partially vaccinated, elderly, and immunocompromised people...

...Rodney Rohde, chair of the Texas State University clinical laboratory science program,...said Tennessee's recommendation could potentially spur other states to issue similar guidelines.

...In a letter to Congress last week, seven Republican representatives from Tennessee called on the federal government to "do everything in its power" to increase the availability of monoclonal antibodies... (letter-- https://twitter.com/jsdelpilar/status/1440046973499830280 )

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-limiting-monoclonal-antibody-trea...
---------------------------------------------------

Tennessee limiting monoclonal antibody treatment to unvaccinated residents
"Clinically, it makes sense," a top Tennessee health official said.
Corky Siemaszko | Sept. 21, 2021

...70 percent of the country’s supply has gone to seven Southern states: Alabama, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana.

...All but Louisiana are led by Republicans who have opposed mandating Covid-19 vaccinations. And all but Florida have below average Covid-19 vaccination rates.

...Last week the Biden administration ordered more doses from the two main suppliers, Regeneron and Eli Lilly and Company, and informed state officials it would start capping the shipments of the drug to make sure there’s enough for the rest of the country.

“Our supply is not unlimited,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. “And we believe it should be equitable across states across the country.”

That move drew immediate criticism from the Republican governors of Florida, Mississippi and Texas (Ron DeSantis, Tate Reeves and Greg Abbott).

DeSantis, in particular, has touted expensive monoclonal antibody treatments (about $2,100 a dose) but has refused to mandate the far-cheaper vaccines (between $10 and $20 a dose) or proven safety measures like wearing masks.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-limiting-monoclonal-antibody-trea...

>133 John5918: Sure, I get the notion that insurance companies enjoy maximizing their profits, but I'm not sure that's what >127 mamzel: had in mind when they said they really liked this idea. I personally don't see what a progressive would find to "like" about this idea of financial penalties for vaccine refusal, or how it might seem to help anything.

To me, this seems like we're using financial penalties on health insurance to modify people's behavior, and I don't love this idea. Entitling private companies whose business is essentially gatekeeping our access to a medical services to levy arbitrary sin taxes on the population just seems inconsistent with any sort of progressive agenda, to me - even when the target of the policy is "the other side".

>136 kiparsky:

Of course. Anybody with even a halfway "progressive" bent will be advocating for a national health service which is free at the point of delivery. Until that happens, capitalist medical insurance companies will continue to maximise their profits.

:D

Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski | 7:48 AM · Sep 22, 2021:
In a show dedicated to covid and election fraud conspiracies, Michael Flynn yesterday brings up an article he read that the Deep State medical establishment is planning to secretly put the covid vaccine in salad dressing.
0:40 ( https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1440644282759614478?ref_src=twsrc%5Etf... )
----------------------------------------------------

Flynn: Libs Are Plotting To Put Vax In Salad Dressing
September 22, 2021 Crackpots, Trump cultists

“Somebody sent me a thing this morning where they’re talking about putting the vaccine in salad dressing. Have you seen this? I mean, I’m thinking to myself, this is the bizarro world, right? This is definitely the bizarro world. These people are seriously thinking about how to impose their will on us in our society, and it has to stop.” – Former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, speaking yesterday on a QAnon podcst.

_________________________________________

Preet Bharara @PreetBharara | 4:08 PM · Sep 22, 2021:
I heard Johnson & Johnson is putting the vax in shampoo

>138 margd: There goes the ranch!

>139 2wonderY: :D
_____________________________________________

Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (Brown School Public Health)@ashishkjha
The world has administered 6 billion doses of COVID vaccines to 3.4 Billion people
For people waiting for more data before getting the shot The data is in
We've vaccinated nearly half of all humanity The vaccines are safe
11:26 PM · Sep 22, 2021
______________________________________________

Fact check: False claim that FDA vaccine officials resigned to avoid criminal charges
Chiara Vercellone | Sept 22, 2021

The claim: FDA officials resigned to avoid prosecution for crimes against humanity

..."Top FDA vaccine officials RESIGN to avoid prosecution for crimes against humanity as White House, CDC commit GENOCIDE," reads a headline in an image posted Sept. 15 (Instagram), which has been liked nearly 300 times in 7 days.

The image is a screengrab from a Sept. 2 article by Natural News,a website that often shares misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The article says two senior FDA officials resigned because "they know about the criminal indictments that are coming against the genocidal vaccine mass murderers," referring to the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the FDA hasn't commented on the reason behind the officials' resignation, health officials told media outlets it had to do with a disagreement over COVID-19 vaccine booster shots...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/22/fact-check-false-claim-...

Meanwhile, in Canada... :(

CityNews Edmonton @CityNewsYEG | 8:26 PM · Sep 22, 2021:
“It’s just unbelievable.”
A number of Edson residents are in Edmonton ICUs following a gathering to try and get COVID-19-- as a way to achieve natural immunity.

@rodmaldaner and @darcyropchan have the story from Edson.
2:20 ( https://twitter.com/CityNewsYEG/status/1440834817159884807 )
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Police in Quebec seek man for punching nurse over wife's COVID-19 shot
Reuters | September 22, 2021

...The man appeared to be very shocked that his wife was vaccinated at the pharmacy "without his authorization," and hit the nurse in the face...

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/police-quebec-seek-man-punching-nurse-ove...

>141 margd: The mind boggles.
And when it's finished boggling, it just lies down and wants a nice rest.

>142 kiparsky:

Indeed. Why on earth would anybody try to get immunity against a potentially lethal disease by, er, catching that same potentially lethal disease, when there is a much simpler and safer way of getting immunity, namely getting vaccinated?

I believe >138 margd: and >141 margd:.

I believe it but I cannot at all comprehend it. Any of it.

And keep in mind that I live in Florida, where The Crazy is strong and out in full force.

>144 Matke: Some have taken to calling Alberta the "Florida of the North". Unfortunately, they' not talking about the weather...

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Covid-19 vaccines do not affect blood color
Louis Baudoin-Laarman | 23 September 2021

Social media posts claim that Covid-19 vaccines negatively affect blood, using a photo of two bags of the liquid -- one lighter red than the other -- as evidence. This is false; experts say the difference in color is due to oxygenation levels, and that the shots will not impact blood color...

https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252F9NA6BT-1

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As more get vaccinated, spread and severity of COVID-19 worse among unvaccinated
Tom Kertscher | September 20, 2021

...Our ruling

A viral image claimed that "peak active cases" of COVID-19 for 2020 vs. 2021 show "this is not a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated.'" ( September 12, 2021 )

"Peak active cases" is not a term used by researchers and it was not clear what figures listed in the image were counting.

New cases in the U.S. peaked in August 2021, after the more contagious delta variant became predominant. But data show the unvaccinated are far more likely to become infected, and to become hospitalized or die, than the vaccinated.

We rate the post False.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/sep/20/viral-image/more-get-vaccinate...

Fact check: Inhaling hydrogen peroxide for COVID-19 is dangerous, experts warn
McKenzie Sadeghi | Sept 26, 2021

The claim: Inhaling hydrogen peroxide through a nebulizer will treat COVID-19

...“0.5% Hydrogen Peroxide Inhalation Therapy kills viruses, bacteria, pathogens in the sinuses, throat and lungs,” reads the caption of a Sept. 23 Facebook video, which accumulated more than 300 views within a couple of days. “Just fill the nebulizer cup with 7ml of saline solution or water and 1ml 3% hydrogen peroxide.”

The video, shared by the Facebook page Hydrogen Peroxide Nebulization, shows a toddler inhaling hydrogen peroxide. The page claimed the method is an “effective safe treatment with zero side effects.”

...Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that inhaling hydrogen peroxide through a nebulizer will treat COVID-19. Health organizations and experts say inhaling hydrogen peroxide is dangerous and can potentially harm the lungs. Public health agencies have not listed it as a recommended treatment. No controlled clinical trials have demonstrated that inhaling hydrogen peroxide will prevent or treat COVID-19...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/26/fact-check-inhaling-hyd...

New York won't extend unemployment benefits to healthcare workers fired over COVID-19 vaccine mandate
Emily Walsh | September 26, 2021

...Healthcare workers who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine and are fired for failing to comply with a new state law will not be able to collect unemployment benefits unless they present a doctor-approved request for medical accommodation, according to the New York Department of Labor.

New York's new vaccine mandate, which goes into effect Monday, makes it necessary for workers in New York's hospitals and nursing homes to have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Employees working at in home care, hospice, and adult care facilities need to be vaccinated by October 7. The mandate also applies to all out-of-state and contract medical staff who practice in New York.

"Workers in a healthcare facility, nursing home, or school who voluntarily quit or are terminated for refusing an employer-mandated vaccination" are not eligible for unemployment insurance because the employer has a "compelling interest" for its employees to be vaccinated, according to the New York Department of Labor website...

https://news.yahoo.com/york-wont-extend-unemployment-benefits-171028367.html

>147 margd:–good. Keeping in mind that at least some of these health workers were on the front lines of the covid battle before the vaccine became available. Still it’s either you’re part of the solution or not and those who choose not to be over a prick in the arm and spread disinformation or even hesitancy should not find any reward for it.

Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing | 10:37 PM · Mar 14, 2021:

A Canadian made a list of reasons for those who don’t want to get a #CovidVaccine.
@brittlestar is what makes the internet glorious. #COVID19

From Brittlestar (1:39)
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1371289436831547398

Fig 2 Uninsured Adults, Republicans, Rural Residents, White Evangelicals, Those Without College Degrees, And Younger Adults Continue To Lag In COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake

Have you personally received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, or not? As you may know, an FDA-authorized vaccine for COVID-19 is now available for free to all adults in the U.S. Do you think you will…?

Bar graph (https://twitter.com/aedwardslevy/status/1442918350607175682/photo/1)
in https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monit...

Ontario doctor is facing disciplinary action for his public anti-vaccine comments.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/patrick-phillips-covid-19-misinformation-...

Ontario's medical regulator has barred a family doctor from providing exemptions for COVID-19 vaccines and face masks, alleging that he has deliberately spread misinformation about the ongoing pandemic.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario says that Dr. Patrick Phillips — who is based in the rural community of Englehart, about 45 kilometres south of Kirkland Lake — is "incompetent" and that he has engaged in "disgraceful, dishonourable" conduct.

The college said the allegations against Phillips have been referred to its disciplinary tribunal. A hearing date has not been set.

>151 2wonderY: Good to see a professional society move on one of their members!
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Poll: 71% of unvaccinated say booster doses mean vaccines aren’t working
"We will not boost our way out of this pandemic."
Beth Mole - 9/28/2021

...A total of 71 percent of unvaccinated people said booster doses show the vaccines are not working as well as promised, according to the survey results published Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).

Boostless boosting
Splitting the unvaccinated further: of the unvaccinated who said they planned to "wait and see" before getting a shot, 69 percent said boosters show the vaccines are not working as well as promised. Of the unvaccinated who said they will "definitely not" get a shot, 82 percent said the same. By contrast, among people who are already vaccinated, 78 percent said the use of booster doses "shows that scientists are continuing to find ways to make vaccines more effective."...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/poll-71-of-unvaccinated-say-booster-dose...