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May 18, 2021

With Less Than Half the Country Fully Vaccinated, I Fear We Reopen Too Soon

I dove into my personal archives to see if I could find the first time I ever mentioned COVID-19 in print. Turns out it was a Facebook post from January 26, 2020, a week before the Iowa Caucus and a little more than a year before seething mobs of hard-right Republicans crashed the doors of the Capitol building looking to hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.

“I have never been one to get spooked by these ZOMG PLAGUE YOU GUYS stories,” I wrote, “even when I lived in a big city. This one, tho, has me nervous for entirely personal reasons. It’s a form of viral pneumonia, and I am only 2.5 years removed from a bout of pneumonia that came within a thin eyelash of killing me. Every time I hear the P-word, my ears perk up. Glad I live in the woods now. 50% increase in a day is wild stuff.”

Sixteen months later, I’m sitting here trying to figure out where to slot that into what passes for reality today. The virus I called “wild stuff,” that I and everyone thought was only in China — but was probably already here — has infected nearly 33 million people in the U.S. in the intervening time, killing more than 587,000. The elderly in nursing homes and workers in meatpacking plants were laid waste, people of color and disadvantaged neighborhoods absorbed a ruthless pummeling, and virtually every institution we ever relied on either wobbled badly or collapsed outright.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump spent his final year in the White House denying what he had known to be true (according to Bob Woodward) about COVID’s brazen lethality since February, because he feared looking weak to his base. He lost an election that still saw 74 million people vote for him despite his horrifying performance, and by the time the Capitol was sacked, the country had moved into a space that was almost completely unrecognizable.

The fact that so much of it came down to masks will be one of the stranger mysteries future historians will ponder long into the night. Thanks in large degree to Trump, wearing a mask came to be perceived as an un-American act. Certainly, it wasn’t something any Trump-supporting Republican was going to do as a matter of honor. After the vaccines arrived, refusing the needle (along with the lost election and the Capitol sack) in favor of a slate of fact-free conspiratorial fictions became yet another acid test for the True Trumpers among us, despite the fact that Trump himself got the jab.

By the millions, they have taken the pledge, and Biden’s rapid vaccine rollout has stalled out for lack of willing participants. At present, only 37.3 percent of the entire population has fully been vaccinated against COVID-19 and its variants.

All these months and dead people later, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abruptly announcing that masks are mostly superfluous for vaccinated people now, the argument has not ended. Instead, masks have become the banner for those who have lost faith in the muddled guidance emerging from the CDC. Many of these people are progressives who stapled themselves to science as a guide through the long dark of the pandemic, but that faith has been badly shaken, and may never return.

A recent New York Times article showcases a man named Joe Glickman, who has no intention of unmasking anywhere in the immediate future:

Even as a combination of evolving public health recommendations and pandemic fatigue lead more Americans to toss the masks they’ve worn for more than a year, Mr. Glickman is among those who say they plan to keep their faces covered in public indefinitely.

For people like Mr. Glickman, a combination of anxiety, murky information about new virus variants and the emergence of an obdurate and sizable faction of vaccine holdouts means mask-free life is on hold — possibly forever. “I have no problem being one of the only people,” said Mr. Glickman, a professional photographer and musician from Albany, N.Y. “But I don’t think I’m going to be the only one.”

Whether made of bedazzled cloth or polypropylene, masks have emerged as a dystopian political flash point during the pandemic. A map of states that enforced mask mandates corresponds closely with how people in those states voted for president.

“Governor Charlie Baker on Monday announced Massachusetts will lift all remaining COVID-19 restrictions on May 29, moving up the state’s reopening timeline by about two months,” reported The Boston Globe on Monday. “Acting Boston Mayor Kim Janey announced Monday afternoon that Boston will join the state and rescind its COVID-19 measures on May 29.” Large-capacity venues like Fenway Park and the TD Garden will likewise be opened to full capacity on the 29th. This is all because of that CDC announcement, and cities across the country are following suit.

I am perfectly willing to hear the argument that anxiety is impacting my decisions after this grueling year of death, uncertainty, loneliness and fear. Maybe I’ve become one of the people you’ve surely read about, who are still cloistered and unnerved after so much solitary time spent worrying about bubbles, hand sanitizer and yes, masks. Time, and the body count, will bring the truth of it, as it has since the beginning.

But I believe this is too soon. Less than half the country is fully vaccinated, and no children under 12 have gotten the shot; there’s about 50 million of them, and as I wondered yesterday, will kids keep wearing masks if they see the adults around them taking those vital coverings off? Anyone with children knows the answer to this, and it isn’t a comforting thought. Meanwhile, India and South America are in the midst of an exploding COVID calamity, and as we have learned to our woe, those calamities couldn’t give less of a damn about respecting borders.

I am hesitant because I know this is all happening to serve the appetites of capitalism.

More than anything, I am hesitant because I know this is all happening to serve the appetites of capitalism. There is no question that business has suffered during this pandemic, but it has time and again been that rush to serve business that has caused us to reopen before we are ready. Every time we have relaxed, the virus has surged, and businesses along with the rest of us have taken it on the chin.

Our constant inability to bring that hungry capitalist hound to heel in the name of science and safety is the reason this pandemic has lasted so long. We have made sacrifices, all of us, but we all take a far back seat to capitalism’s need for warm worker bodies and cash. Capitalism has won that argument every time it has come up during this thing, and today it is winning again.

Nothing would please me more than to be wrong about this, but I haven’t been wrong very often since that Facebook post from two Januarys ago (something else that has also sucked), and I’m pretty certain I am not wrong now. I will keep wearing my mask and avoid crowds as best I can. I believe in my heart this thing will be over to a livable degree someday, but it is not today.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
May 17, 2021

CDC’s Confusing Announcement on Masks Creates a Dangerous Honor System

I found myself out and about with several vaccinated friends this weekend, just after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abruptly blew up its mask guidance to the consternation of millions. The strange chaos of “mask rules” was on vivid display wherever we went — they were required at inside venues and crowded outdoor spaces, but once we were seated inside a restaurant, the mask could come off no matter how clustered we were — reminding me why I was more comfortable at home than anywhere else over these last 14 months.

The new CDC mask guidelines state that if you’re fully vaccinated, you’re pretty much free to hang that sucker on a hook and enjoy breathing air that does not smell like your face. (I never knew my face had a scent until COVID, another dollop of pandemic wisdom I could have done without.)

The announcement tried very hard to be the virus version of V-E Day, a moment of celebration to be shared by all. Instead, it had many eyeing each other, and especially the deliberately unvaccinated, with alarmed distrust. We’re supposed to trust those guys? Combined with some deeply curious timing, and what we have here is the first bona fine both-feet bollocks of the Biden administration.

“[T]he huge policy turnaround caught senior White House and administration officials, medical experts, elected officials and business leaders completely off guard,” reported The Washington Post, “and prompted some physicians to criticize the move as premature. Some Democratic governors were angered by the White House’s rollout, arguing the move effectively passed the buck to states and businesses to implement the new rules without any assistance. The abrupt timing of Walensky’s decision also smacked of politics to Biden’s antagonists, who noted that the president benefited from the announcement during a difficult week when many Americans queued up in gas lines, tensions in Israel flared and markets roiled amid inflation fears.”

Even this, however, comes with its own muddied waters. According to Politico, the president was not informed about the new rules until scant hours before the announcement. This was an abrupt departure from procedure for Biden, who reportedly rolls like a dog in the details of an issue for a long time before making a decision. When his staff is slow or inept with the delivery of those details, Biden has been reportedly quick to anger. One wonders how he reacted to his own CDC pulling what amounted to a surprise announcement of the single most important policy decision of his presidency. I can see Biden doing a solid R. Lee Ermey imitation from Full Metal Jacket: “Can I be in charge for a little while? Well thank you very much.” So much for Sleepy Joe.

The consternation over these new rules is palpable. Vaccinated folks can unmask, which is super, great, but who is vaccinated and who isn’t? We’re doing the honor system now? Will vaccinated people eventually have to wear a scarlet “V” to announce their status? Vax cards? Vaxxports? If unvaccinated people act in bad faith and go maskless, doesn’t it invite the kind of scenario that just struck the New York Yankees, who had eight vaccinated players recently test positive? Also, India and Brazil are still on fire with virus variants reaving people by the thousands. How is this anything other than a dangerously unformed premature decision?

Are we to expect small children wear their masks when their vaccinated parents or caregivers don’t? Anyone with 12 seconds of toddler experience knows that’s a non-starter from the jump.

Parents with young children are also in search of some insight on the matter. There are nearly 50 million children under 12 in the U.S., all of them unvaccinated. Are they safe around unvaccinated people who are pretending to be vaccinated? Are we to expect small children wear their masks when their vaccinated parents or caregivers don’t? Anyone with 12 seconds of toddler experience knows that’s a non-starter from the jump.

Hundreds of epidemiologists had fully expected the prior mask mandates to remain in place for at least another year. “I think the CDC meant to say something really good, which is these vaccines are really protective,” medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen told CNN on Sunday. “The thing is though, there were unintended consequences of their actions. We’ve seen governors and mayors and business owners drop mask mandates, and as a result of that we’ve now made life much less safe for people who are unvaccinated, for immuno-compromised individuals and for young children who cannot yet be vaccinated.”

It is to be hoped that some clarity will be brought to this situation with haste. “I would imagine within a period of just a couple of weeks, you’re going to start to see significant clarification of some of the actually understandable and reasonable questions that people are asking,” Anthony Fauci told Face the Nation over the weekend.

Good. In the meantime, let your common sense be your guide. Get vaccinated if you can, as soon as you can, and tell your friends. Wear your mask until this confusion passes. Your face smells just fine.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
May 17, 2021

Nation’s largest RN Union condemns CDC rollback on Covid protection guidance

National Nurses United (NNU), the largest union of registered nurses in the United States, today condemned new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance stating that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks, avoid crowds or large gatherings, and no longer needed to isolate after exposure or get tested unless they develop symptoms. Nurses say that given the threat to their patients across the country, they are especially disappointed that the CDC would ease up its Covid guidance on the heels of International Nurses Day.

The post Nation’s largest RN Union condemns CDC rollback on Covid protection guidance appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
March 30, 2021

Justice on Trial

Prosecutors showed a 9-minute 29-second video of the murder, and told jurors to “believe your eyes.” Continue reading

The post Justice on Trial appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
March 15, 2021

Federalism Is Killing Us

Deference to state governments has severely undermined public health efforts during the pandemic and deepened geographic inequality in the United States.

This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
March 2, 2021

Biden May Invoke Defense Production Act to Help Merck Produce New J&J Vaccine

President Joe Biden is set to announce a partnership on Tuesday between pharmaceutical company Merck and Johnson & Johnson to manufacture the latter company’s new single-shot COVID-19 vaccine. Senior administration officials indicated to The Washington Post that Biden would be invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up production.

Administration officials told The Washington Post that the deal represents a “historic partnership,” and that the companies “recognize this is a wartime effort.” Biden will make remarks later on Tuesday about the partnership and possibly the invocation of the Defense Production Act to help Merck secure vaccine manufacturing supplies.

The partnership has the potential to double supply of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, administration officials said.

On Monday, Johnson & Johnson’s CEO said that the company is planning to manufacture and ship 100 million doses by June and a billion by the end of the year, though it’s not clear if he said that this would happen with the partnership in mind or not. Four million doses of the vaccine began shipping on Monday after the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization over the weekend.

The administration struck a deal with Merck after Biden administration officials learned early on that the production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was lagging behind schedule, The Washington Post reports.

Merck, whose own COVID vaccine effort was discontinued in January and which has a long history of vaccine development and manufacturing, will use two of their facilities to produce the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. One will make the vaccine itself, and the other will fill the vaccine into vials and pack it up for shipment.

The partnership portends a potential emphasis by the Biden administration on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is easier to ship and store than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Since it’s a one-dose regimen, it is also easier with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to get people fully vaccinated quicker. The vaccine could eventually play an important role in providing booster shots and inoculating children, both of which the company is exploring.

Biden invoking the Defense Production Act could be crucial in the effort to get the U.S. population vaccinated quickly. The Defense Production Act, a wartime law that can be invoked by the president to compel companies to manufacture certain supplies, has been in the spotlight for much of the pandemic for its potential to help fight COVID.

Last year, then-President Donald Trump invoked the law to manufacture protective equipment for medical workers. But many say that he waited too long to invoke the law and, even so, used it very rarely. The White House suggested that they feared, bizarrely, that using it would be equivalent to left-wing overreach, according to a New York Times report. The publication found that Trump only used it six times for medical equipment despite claiming that they used it 80 times, and experts said that he could have used it much more effectively.

With the suggestion that Biden may use the Defense Production Act to ramp up vaccine production in a tangible way, some breathed a sigh of relief. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) tweeted, “This is huge. ⁦[Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin)]⁩ and I begged and begged the Trump Administration to use the Defense Production Act to address the pandemic. Trump refused.”

Cases have been declining steadily since the infection rate peaked in the U.S. in January following the winter holidays. But health officials warn against the relaxing of COVID-related restrictions happening in many states, encouraging people to keep wearing masks and social distancing to limit the spread of the newer, more transmissible variants of the virus.

“Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variant spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard earned ground we have gained,” said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky on Monday. “Please stay strong in your conviction.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 5, 2021

U.S. Surpasses More People Vaccinated Than All-Time COVID Cases

This week, the U.S. passed an encouraging milestone: More people in the U.S. have received their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine than have tested positive for COVID-19 since the virus first arrived stateside, according to Bloomberg. This news comes as a slate of other promising news on the pandemic has cropped up this first week of February.

The total number of vaccinated people surpassed the total number of people who had tested positive on Monday, according to Bloomberg’s count, at 26.5 million and 26.3 million, respectively. Since then, the gap has widened slightly, and there have now been 27.9 million vaccinations and 26.4 million cases in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The current vaccination rate in the U.S., Bloomberg says, is about 1.3 million doses administered a day, though some of the doses counted are the second dose.

With the numbers of vaccinated people growing, cases, hospitalizations and deaths have all dropped over the past week or so, according to The Atlantic. Case counts are still high, especially compared to lower rates from last year, but all three statistics are generally trending downwards from January’s highs.

Cases from last week are down at least 16 percent from the previous week, the COVID Tracking Project reports for The Atlantic. January had the most deaths yet from COVID, so there is still a long way to go, but this week’s drop in death counts is the first time deaths have dropped since October, they write.

So far, the vaccine has mostly gone to medical workers and elderly people, which has led to promising downward trends in nursing homes: New health data is showing that cases in nursing homes, which have been among the deadliest places for the virus, dropped by 22 percent from December to January. A combination of prioritizing the vaccine for older people and holiday-related lockdowns in these facilities likely drove the trend downward.

And, on the vaccine front, more good news may be on the way. Since being inaugurated, President Joe Biden and his COVID team have been working to streamline vaccine distribution, announcing more vaccine purchases, increasing availability to states and unrolling test programs like sending vaccines directly to pharmacies beginning next week. Currently, only the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been available to the public, but more may be soon on the way.

On Thursday, Johnson & Johnson announced that it has officially submitted an application for emergency authorization to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Over the next weeks, the FDA will review the data with its vaccine advisory committee and vote on authorization on February 26, after which authorization would be announced shortly.

The company says that they are ready to ship doses as soon as it’s cleared. If authorized, this puts the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on track to start shipping at the beginning of March.

Johnson & Johnson announced the results of their vaccine trials last week. Though their vaccine isn’t as effective in preventing moderate to severe infection as those developed by Pfizer and Moderna, it still was 100 percent effective at preventing hospitalization and death in the trials. It’s easier to transport and is a one-shot regimen instead of Pfizer and Moderna’s two-dose regimen, which could free up time and money for more vaccinations.

On Friday, a new study showed the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford in the U.K. protected people against the new, more contagious variant of the virus that was first found in Britain. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine was also found to prevent all hospitalization and death and is 84 percent effective against the original strain of the virus and about 75 percent effective against the strain found in the U.K. However, the study has yet to be peer reviewed.

Though the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine has been approved for use in Europe, AstraZeneca will have to finish clinical trials in the U.S. before it can apply for authorization from the FDA. The authorization will likely not take place for another month or two, and officials in December said that the U.S. will likely have to wait until April to use the vaccine.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 13, 2020

Divided States of the Pandemic

The federal government’s early failures to manage the coronavirus shifted a heavy burden to local officials. We look at how decision-makers in two states, California and Florida, found their way to shutdown and beyond.

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This post was originally published on Reveal.
May 9, 2020

(Un)protected

At a time when America is relying on health care workers more than ever, we look at why there’s not enough protective gear to keep them safe.

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This post was originally published on Reveal.
March 14, 2020

Containing the Coronavirus

As the new coronavirus spreads through the U.S., we chronicle how it came to California, with the voices of first responders, experts and passengers quarantined on a cruise ship docked in San Francisco Bay.

Plus, we hear the story of an African American man who decades ago was shot and killed by a police officer who later became leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

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This post was originally published on Reveal.

Category: CDC