Handling the coronavirus crisis

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A health official who helped lead Florida’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been put on administrative leave as state officials investigate whether he tried to compel employees to get vaccinated. The state health agency is conducting an inquiry into Raul Pino, director of the Florida department of health in Orange county, to “determine if any laws were broken in this case”, the state department of health press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, said in an email. Sources told WFTV that Pino was placed on administrative leave after he emailed staff members at the Orange county department of health regarding Covid-19 vaccination rates on 4 January. In the email, Pino wrote: “I have a hard time understanding how we can be in public health and not practice it.” He added that he had an analyst examine vaccination data among employees and that out of the department’s 568 active staff members, only 77 had received a Covid booster dose, 219 had two doses of the vaccine and 34 had only one dose. “I am sorry but in the absence of reasonable and real reasons it is irresponsible not to be vaccinated,” he wrote. “We have been at this for two years, we were the first to give vaccines to the masses, we have done more than 300,000 and we are not even at 50% … pathetic.”

Florida health official put on leave after encouraging staff to get Covid vaccine | Florida | The Guardian

• Yes, terrible, a crime trying to convince fellow healthcare workers to get vaccinated, which they should anyway.
  

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The candidate to be Florida's top doctor and leader of the Department of Health has already been the subject of much controversy for his role in the state's COVID-19 response. Earlier this month, he said it was "really time for people to be living, to make the decisions they want regarding vaccination, to enjoy the fact that many people have natural immunity," despite surging COVID-19 cases in the state. In October, he also defended his choice to refuse to wear a mask during a meeting with a state senator who has breast cancer. 

Democrats walk out of confirmation hearing for Florida surgeon general | TheHill

• Florida's next surgeon general...
  

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She is fiercely loyal to Donald Trump. But when the former US president came to her home city and praised coronavirus vaccines, Flora Moore did something she never thought possible. She booed him. “He said take the vaccine but we all booed and said no,” she recalled of Trump’s event with broadcaster Bill O’Reilly in Orlando, Florida. “He heard us loud and clear because the Amway Center was packed. We let him know ‘no’ and a couple of us even hollered out, ‘It’s killing people!’” There is no scientific basis to the claim that the vaccines are killing people. In fact, they have demonstrably saved thousands of lives. But Moore is indicative of the extreme anti-vaccine sentiment consuming the base of the Republican party – a monster that Trump himself can no longer control...

What was arguably Trump’s most important legacy from an otherwise disastrous pandemic response, and a divisive four-year presidency, has turned into a political liability, threatening to turn his own fans against him. Laurie Garrett, an award-winning science writer, observed: “It’s probably the only time his base has ever booed him about anything. If he can no longer brag about Operation Warp Speed, what can he brag about regarding how he handled Covid?”

‘Trump is not my God’: how the former president’s only vaccine victory turned sour | Donald Trump | The Guardian

• In what kind of reality doe these people who shout that the vaccine is killing people live when it has demonstrably saved hundreds of thousands of lives and been applied a several billion times with virtually no catastrophic outcomes, and even Trump can't get through to them?? Scary..
  
• And the result:
  

Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, points out that counties that voted for Trump in 2020 have a far higher mortality rate than counties that voted for Biden... About nine in 10 Democrats and six in 10 Republicans have been vaccinated, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, while 62% of Democrats and just 32% of Republicans have been both vaccinated and boosted. 

‘Trump is not my God’: how the former president’s only vaccine victory turned sour | Donald Trump | The Guardian

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But since the pandemic began, Canada has fared far better than the US, despite similar income disparities, territorial divides, and comorbidities such as obesity and hypertension as its southern neighbour. There is a staggering difference, for example, in how many more Americans have died because of Covid compared to Canadians, both in absolute numbers and as the ratio of deaths per million inhabitants.

Why is Canada's Covid death rate so much lower than US? - BBC News

• Deaths per 1M inhabitants almost 3x that of Canada
  

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The Fox anchor Neil Cavuto returned to the air on Monday, to say he nearly died from a second bout with the coronavirus and to tell detractors including those who sent death threats over his support for vaccines: “So sorry to disappoint you.”

More than 935,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 in the last two years. The seven-day average daily death rate is just under 2,000 – the vast majority unvaccinated. Fox has strict vaccination requirements for staff. But hosts, prominently including Tucker Carlson, have spread misinformation about vaccines and resistance to Covid-19 public health measures including vaccination mandates.

Cavuto is immunocompromised, with multiple sclerosis and having survived heart surgery and cancer.
After his first positive Covid test, in October, he implored viewers: “My God, stop the politics. Life is too short to be an ass. Life is way too short to be ignorant of the promise of something that is helping people worldwide. Stop the deaths, stop the suffering, please get vaccinated, please.” Some viewers did not stop the politics. Cavuto revealed that he received disturbing messages, including death threats.

On Fox Business on Monday, Cavuto said he had been hospitalised for weeks but Fox had not publicised his condition out of respect for his privacy. His second Covid case, he said, was a “far, far more serious strand” because of his immunocompromised status. He had, he said, been in “intensive care for quite a while”. “It was really touch and go,” he said. “Some of you who’ve wanted to put me out of my misery darn near got what you wished for. So sorry to disappoint you.” Cavuto also said: “Let me be clear: doctors say had I not been vaccinated at all, I wouldn’t be here.

Fox anchor survives second Covid case and tells detractors: ‘Sorry to disappoint’ | Fox News | The Guardian

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The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?

The united states reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?

Many countries have been pummeled by the coronavirus, but few have fared as poorly as the U.S. Its death rate surpassed that of any other large, wealthy nation—especially during the recent Omicron surge. The Biden administration placed all its bets on a vaccine-focused strategy, rather than the multilayered protections that many experts called for, even as America lagged behind other wealthy countries in vaccinating (and boosting) its citizens—especially elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus. In a study of 29 high-income countries, the U.S. experienced the largest decline in life expectancy in 2020 and, unlike much of Europe, did not bounce back in 2021. It was also the only country whose lowered life span was driven mainly by deaths among people under 60. Dying from COVID robbed each American of, on average, nine years of life at the lowest end of estimates and 17 at the highest. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century. Neither World War II nor any of the flu pandemics that followed it dented American longevity so badly.

Why America Became Numb to COVID Deaths - The Atlantic

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Just over a month into year three of the Covid-19 pandemic, research revealed Thursday that life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2021—which followed a well-documented drop in 2020 and contrasted a recovery trend in other high-income countries. The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, shows that U.S. life expectancy fell from 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.99 years in 2020 and 76.60 years in 2021, a net loss of 2.26 years. The study comes as progressives in Congress continue to fight for Medicare for All legislation to replace the U.S. for-profit healthcare system—one in which 112 million adults struggle to afford care, according to Gallup and West Health. The research also comes just days after a Poor People’s Campaign analysis exposedhow the public health crisis was twice as deadly in poor counties as in wealthy ones and “exacerbated preexisting social and economic disparities that have long festered in the U.S.”

Drop in Life Expectancy 'Speaks Volumes' About How US Handled Covid: Expert | naked 

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Before the pandemic, there were approximately 140 million poor and low-income people in the US, accounting for over 40% of the population and including more than half of the children in the country (SPM) (Barnes, 2019). Nearly half of all renters were rent burdened in the US, nine percent of people did not have health insurance, with wide variations by racial and ethnic groups: 22% of Native Americans people, 20% of Hispanic people, and 11% of Black people, 7.8% of white people, and 7.2% of Asian people did not have health insurance in 2019 (Lynch et al. 2021; Artiga, Hill, & Orgera, 2021). These pre-existing disparities in healthcare access, wealth distribution, and housing insecurity yielded disastrous effects once the pandemic hit the US. COVID-19 compounded these gaps in access and delivery, creating a public health emergency that caused increased harm to populations based on their class, race, gender, geography, and ability.

A Poor People’s Pandemic Report – Poor People's Campaign

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At the very beginning of the pandemic, several governments – including in Sweden, Netherlands and the UK – believed the best path through this crisis was to allow a controlled spread of infections through the population, especially the young and healthy, in order to reach some static state against the virus. The idea was that “the herd” who got infected would protect a more vulnerable minority.

This concept came from our approach to other vaccines, in which we inoculate the majority of children against, for example, measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) in order to protect those who cannot be vaccinated due to health conditions. If Sars-CoV-2 only infected people once, or vaccinated people couldn’t catch Covid (ie if infection or vaccination resulted in lifelong immunity) then herd immunity would be possible. By now, we would have eliminated Covid completely in the richer world where seroprevalence – estimates of antibody levels – are more than 90%, and in Britain as high as 98%.

However, this is far from the position we’re in. The rising number of documented reinfections, sometimes occurring relatively quickly after the initial infection, as well as the high number of infections with the Omicron variant among the fully vaccinated, means that herd immunity is likely impossible – even if seroprevalence hits 100%. Relying on herd immunity to manage Covid-19 rather than on the strategies of east Asian countries to suppress it until a vaccine was available was a gamble that Britain took early in March and unfortunately lost. Especially given the presence of variants, Sars-CoV-2 will just keep circulating and reinfecting people.

Herd immunity now seems impossible. Welcome to the age of Covid reinfection | Devi Sridhar | The Guardian

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Research shows that those who are immunocompromised do not produce a strong response to vaccines. “For someone who is immunocompromised, it doesn’t take a very bad case of Covid to kill them,” Dr. Yancey said. “They just don’t have the same amount of reserve in their immune system to fight it off.” More than seven million people in the United States, or 3 percent of adults, are immunocompromised, according to some experts. That number includes those who are taking immunosuppressive medicines to treat cancer or autoimmune disorders or to prevent the rejection of organ or stem-cell transplants. And that estimate does not include the millions more with other diseases that decrease immunity — diseases like AIDS; chronic kidney, liver or lung disease including asthma and emphysema; diabetes; and several hundred genetic diseases.

Making matters worse, several new coronavirus variants have emerged, and the vaccines may be less effective against them. While antiviral pills like Paxlovid decrease the risk of hospitalization and death, health officials have warned that antibody therapies such as Evusheld are likely  ineffective against these variants and the Food and Drug Administration has already pulled authorization for another antibody treatment called bebtelovimab. Immunocompromised people may no longer be able to rely on these therapies to fill in gaps in their protection. All of this means that immunocompromised people and their families must continue to make tough decisions as Covid cases once again tick up across the country..

How Immunocompromised Experts Will Celebrate Another Pandemic Holiday