deaths

Saturday August 28, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday August 28, 2021

Time to say it: We’re done with the vaccine refusers

December 11, 2020

On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the coronavirus, and approvals for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines could follow soon. This could be a significant step in convincing the millions of unvaccinated Americans to finally get vaccinated, even if it doesn’t quickly transform the state of the pandemic.

It’s also an opportunity for us to say to the hard-core vaccine refusers: We’re done with you.

We’ll treat you when you come to the hospital, of course, because that’s how medicine works; while doctors and nurses dealing with the wave of covid-19 patients caused by the delta variant might like to turn away anyone who refused to take a vaccine, they won’t. But it’s time to refocus our outreach efforts and our public and private pandemic policies so that accommodating, understanding and pandering to the refusers is no longer one of our chief concerns.

It remains to be seen how much of an effect the move from emergency-use authorization to full FDA approval will have on vaccination rates. What we know is that a lot of hesitant people said it would make a difference to them; in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 31 percent of the unvaccinated said they’d be more likely to take the vaccine if it had full FDA approval. It’s not that those people had a detailed understanding of the FDA approval process; more likely they’re just looking for additional reassurance.

June 17, 2021

And every little bit — carrots, sticks and even a dose of fear — helps. We’ve seen an increase in vaccinations in recent weeks as the delta variant has plunged parts of the country back into the depths of the pandemic; for some people who may have previously thought we had this thing pretty much licked, the waves of infections and deaths pushed them to action.

FDA approval will also probably convince more companies to begin demanding that their employees be vaccinated. All of this, we can hope, will create an atmosphere in which being unvaccinated by choice will mean voluntarily marginalizing oneself from society. If you’re determined to make that statement about yourself, that you’re the kind of person to whom “freedom” means taking the chance of infecting other people with a virus that has killed millions, we’re going to do everything we can to isolate you.

May 8, 2021

To those who say “mocking those people will never convince them to take the vaccine!”, let me suggest that it’s too late to persuade them. I’m not talking about the hesitant and the uncertain — they can be persuaded, and we need to redouble efforts to reach them. But when you see that in Mississippi — which like many states with low vaccination rates is now being ravaged by the delta variant — the state’s chief public health official felt compelled to make a public plea for people to stop drinking livestock dewormer, since a good number got the idea that it’s a treatment for covid, you have to ask if there’s anything at all that would persuade committed refusers.

Actually, we know how they got the dewormer idea: the supercharged rumor-spreading machine known as social media. Over the weekend, Facebook reluctantly admitted that “an article raising concerns that the coronavirus vaccine could lead to death was the top performing link in the United States on its platform from January through March of this year.”

It’s gotten to the point where at a rally on Saturday in Alabama of his most loyal dead-enders, former president Donald Trump said that while he believes in everyone’s freedom, “I recommend: take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good. Take the vaccines,” and boos rang out.

January 12, 2021

I’m pretty sure that if between swigs of horse dewormer, your uncle is booing his god-king Donald Trump for saying a good word about vaccination, gentle persuasion isn’t going to have much effect on him.

Will one more anti-vax conservative talk radio host dying from covid do the trick for him and his Facebook friends? How about another Republican governor contracting it? Don’t hold your breath.

Experts now say we’ll never reach true herd immunity; rather than covid being eliminated, the pandemic will end with it becoming merely endemic, a part of our lives that never goes away but is suppressed to a level of infections and deaths we can tolerate, like other viruses.

In the shorter term, there is reason to believe that an accumulation of factors — FDA approval, the current wave of covid deaths, more businesses requiring vaccinations, perhaps even simple fatigue after living with this for a year and a half — could convince more and more of the vaccine hesitant to overcome their doubts.

July 3, 2021

But just as the virus itself will always be with us, so will the adamant refusers. They’ll be trying out insane new treatments, while the rest of us shake our heads at people who’d rather gargle with turpentine (or whatever the next Facebook remedy is) than get a free lifesaving vaccine. They’ll keep engaging in unhinged and violent public behavior (like assaulting teachers over mask policies), for which they should just be arrested. Our only concern should be keeping ourselves safe from them; they deserve no more consideration than that.

They won’t disappear, but we can treat them like social pariahs. And if they don’t like it? They can go ahead and wallow in their fantasies of oppression and courageous independence. Nobody said “freedom” was free. (Paul Waldman – The Washington Post) 

 

Wednesday June 3, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday June 3, 2020

The Protests Will Spread the Coronavirus

The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say.

May 29, 2020

The virus seems to spread the most when people yell (such as to chant a slogan), sneeze (to expel pepper spray), or cough (after inhaling tear gas). It is transmitted most efficiently in crowds and large gatherings, and research has found that just a few contagious people can infect hundreds of susceptible people around them. The virus can spread especially easily in small, cramped places, such as police vans and jails.

As such, for the past several days, the virus has found new environments in which to spread across the United States. At least 75 cities have seen widespread demonstrations and social unrest as Americans have gathered to protest systemic racism and the killing of George Floyd, the black man who died last week under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. Dozens of cities imposed curfews over the weekend amid widespread looting. It has been among the most turbulent moments of societal upheaval in the U.S. since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

The pandemic and unrest together have trapped the country in a bind. The demonstrations oppose police brutality. But peaceful, masked protesters—and the journalists covering them—have sometimes been met with an overly aggressive police response.

“I don’t think there’s a question of whether there will be spikes in cases in 10 to 14 days,” Mark Shrime, a public-health researcher at Harvard, told me. “With so many protests happening, that are getting so much bigger, I don’t think it’s a question of if, but when and where.”

Coronavirus cartoons

Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, agrees. “All things considered, there’s little doubt that these protests will translate into increased risk of transmission for COVID-19,” she told me by email.

Yet that risk does not lead Majumder to oppose the protests. “I personally believe that these particular protests—which demand justice for black and brown bodies that have been brutalized by the police—are a necessary action,” she said. “Structural racism has been a public-health crisis for much longer than the pandemic has.” Even the COVID-19 pandemic has harmed black people disproportionately, Majumder told me. While about 13 percent of Americans are black, a quarter of all COVID-19 deaths where the victim’s race is known have befallen black people, according to the COVID Racial Data Tracker.

Alexandra Phelan, a professor of global-health law at Georgetown University, also told me she believed that the protests were justifiable, even amid the public-health crisis. She drew a difference between these protests, against police brutality, and the protests earlier this spring, which opposed mask mandates and social-distancing rules. At the very least, she said, many protesters this weekend were wearing masks, reducing the risk of transmission to the community. (The Atlantic) 

 

Friday February 23, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday February 23, 2018

Families struggle to survive in Eastern Ghouta, under siege

A four-day-long bombardment by Syrian government forces is reported to have killed more than 300 civilians in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta area. Here, people living there tell their stories.

February 20, 2014

The enclave – home to an estimated 393,000 people – has been under siege since 2013. But pro-government media say a major military operation might soon begin to clear rebel factions from their last major stronghold near the capital Damascus.

The relentless air and artillery strikes are leaving civilians, particularly women and children, in a state of fear and forcing them to seek shelter underground, where they are largely deprived of food and sanitation.

“We are living in a basement, underneath a half-destroyed house,” Asia, a 28-year-old student and mother-of-three whose husband was killed in an attack while he was on his way to work, told the BBC. 

“My daughter is sick. Her hair is falling out because she is so afraid.” 

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, says the government and its allies have carried out more than 1,290 air strikes on the Eastern Ghouta and fired 6,190 rockets and shells at the region since mid-November, when hostilities between government and rebel forces escalated. 

Between Sunday and Wednesday alone there were reportedly about 420 air strikes, and 140 barrel bombs were dropped by helicopters.

UN war crimes experts are also investigating several reports of rockets allegedly containing chlorine being fired at the Eastern Ghouta this year.

The recent surge in casualties means that more than 1,070 civilians, including several hundred children and women, have been killed and 3,900 injured in the past three months, according to the Syrian Observatory. (Source: BBC News)