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Saturday January 30, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday January 30, 2021

Fauci calls South Africa-based variant’s resilience a ‘wake-up call.’

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci warned Friday that new clinical trial results from Johnson & Johnson, showing that its vaccine is less effective against a highly infectious variant of the coronavirus circulating in South Africa, were a “wake-up call.” He said the virus will continue to mutate, and vaccine manufacturers will have to be “nimble to be able to adjust readily” to reformulating the vaccines if needed.

March 26, 2020

Dr. Fauci’s warning, at the White House briefing on the virus, comes amid increasing concern about new and more infectious variants of the virus that are emerging overseas and turning up in the United States. This week, officials in South Carolina reported identifying two cases of the variant circulating in South Africa, and officials in Minnesota announced they had found a case of the variant that was first detected in Brazil.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was also at the briefing, said another variant, first identified in Britain, has now been confirmed in 379 cases in 29 states. 

She said officials remained concerned about the variants and were “rapidly ramping up surveillance and sequencing activities” to closely monitor them. Unlike Britain, the United States has been conducting little of the genomic sequencing necessary to track the spread of the variants.

August 6, 2020

Dr. Walensky also issued a plea to Americans to continue wearing masks and practice social distancing, and to avoid travel. Earlier this month, the C.D.C. warned that the variant circulating in Britain could become the dominant source of infection in the United States and would likely lead to a surge in cases and deaths that could overwhelm hospitals. And given the speed at which the variant swept through that country, it is conceivable that by April it could make up a large fraction of infections in the United States.

December 11, 2020

“By the time someone has symptoms, gets a test, has a positive result and we get the sequence, our opportunity for doing real case control and contact tracing is largely gone,” she said. “We should be treating every case as if it’s a variant during this pandemic right now.”

Friday’s briefing, the second in what the Biden White House has promised will be thrice-weekly updates on the pandemic, came just hours after Johnson & Johnson reported that while its vaccine was 72 percent effective in the United States, the efficacy rate was just 57 percent in South Africa, where a variant has been spreading. (New York Times) 

 

Friday December 11, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday December 11, 2020

Act now to stop anti-vaccine misinformation, says Ottawa researcher

December 1, 2020

Canadian regulators have approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, and one Ottawa researcher is urging public health authorities to start addressing false anti-vaccination information now to combat potential vaccine hesitancy.

Maxime Lê, a master’s candidate at the University of Ottawa who recently completed his thesis on anti-vaccine arguments in Canada, said now is the time to get ahead of conspiracy theories and misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccine.

One of the best weapons is answering people’s questions in a way that builds trust, he said.

“A lot of people are focusing on the logistical issues of vaccine delivery but the focus should indeed rely on that open and transparent communication,” Lê told CBC Radio’s All in a Day on Tuesday.

“Perhaps one of the reasons why people are so afraid is because their questions are not answered at all.”

A recent poll suggests that a fifth of Canadians are undecided about whether to get vaccinated while 16 per cent are against vaccination. Among the majority who said they wanted to get vaccinated, 15 per cent said they would wait several months before the shot and 38 per cent said they would wait one or two months, to make sure everything’s going well.

July 21, 2020

Lê said there are many themes that come up among people who question vaccines, from questioning the toxicity of ingredients, suggesting natural remedies or immunity as superior to vaccines, to the persistent myth that vaccines cause autism.

“People might be hesitant to vaccinate because they have unanswered questions, they have fears, they have concerns that public health authorities aren’t exactly addressing in their communications,” he said.

Lê suggests public health authorities begin consultations now to hear from residents about why they might be hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine to ensure they answer people’s questions and concerns, whatever they may be. 

He recently met with Ottawa Public Health (OPH) who he said was very receptive to his ideas. CBC reached out to OPH Tuesday but the agency was not able to provide information about its vaccine communications strategy by publishing time.

April 11, 2019

Lê said it’s important that organizations like OPH foster a trusting relationship with the public before anti-vaccination theorists have time to propagate misinformation.

“Anti-vaxxers position themselves as defenders of Canadian civil rights and liberties, and they’ll start to say these unscientific claims which, to everyday people, kind of make sense,” he said.

“It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what exactly is good science.”

Earlier this week Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said 249,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses could arrive in Canada by the end of the year. The first shots will likely be distributed to long-term care home residents and staff.

Documents released by U.S. regulators Tuesday confirmed that Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine strongly protects against COVID-19. (CBC) 

 

Thursday August 6, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday August 6, 2020

Audit Finds Most American Public Schools Need Major Repairs

July 25, 2020

The majority of public school districts in the U.S. are focusing their budgets on security to prevent shootings instead of widely needed building repairs, a federal watchdog found in a new report.

The Government Accountability Office, an independent federal agency that monitors how tax dollars are spent, said in a report released Thursday that school districts’ highest priorities for their facilities were improving security, expanding technology and addressing health hazards.

The report, based on a survey of hundreds of districts, shows that about half of the school districts in the U.S. need to update or replace multiple systems like heating, ventilation, air conditioning or plumbing.

April 30, 2020

One-third of schools need HVAC system upgrades, which could result in air quality or mold problems if not addressed, according to the watchdog. Additionally, one-quarter of districts reported a need to repair or replace lighting fixtures in at least half of their schools. A similar number of districts need repairs to roofing, security, plumbing or windows in most of their schools.

The GAO report shows images of crumbling schools around the country, including some that hold standing water, are full of asbestos or require bottled drinking water.

“Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, outdated and hazardous school buildings were undermining the quality of public education and putting students and educators at risk,” House Education Committee Chairman Bobby Scott, D-Va., said in a statement responding to the report. “Now, the pandemic is exacerbating the consequences of our failure to make necessary investments in school infrastructure.”

Life in a Pandemic

Schools that serve low-income communities are especially affected. Local government funding in more affluent areas made up 72% of overall funding for building costs, while in schools in low-income areas only received about 35% of their facilities funding from the local government. (Courthousenews) 

 

Thursday June 11, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 11, 2020

Brazilian president’s pandemic denial has cost lives, but may not hurt him politically

What do you do if you are in charge of dealing with the pandemic and the number of deaths is getting out of control?

Simple. Stop publishing the number.

August 28, 2019

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has been having a bad time with the pandemic. His default mode has been callous disinterest: when told in early May that the country’s COVID-19 death toll had reached 5,000, he said “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”

So on Sunday, with Brazil’s death toll about to pass 40,000 and become second only to that of the United States, Bolsonaro stopped his government from publishing the total any more.

From now on, only today’s number of infections, deaths and recoveries will be announced. No more awkward comparisons with other countries, no five-digit running total to confront him with his failure each day. And of course no attempt to establish the real number of deaths, which is almost certainly at least twice the official number since many victims never got to hospitals.

December 16, 2019

There is a temptation to group the three populist leaders of big Western democracies together, and they do have a lot in common. Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson removed a similarly damning piece of data from the daily news conference when the UK’s death toll per million overtook that of every other major European country. (It is now second-worst in the entire world.) 

America’s Donald Trump, Bolsonaro’s idol, spent just as much time in the early months of this year belittling the gravity of the threat (Bolsonaro: “It’s only a little flu”; Trump: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”) None of the three men will wear a mask, and they are all compulsive serial liars.

March 16, 2020

Nevertheless, there are major differences. Johnson manages to sound as if he cares about all the lives lost, and Trump at least goes through the motions occasionally. Johnson eventually declared a lockdown, although much too late, and Trump at least went along for a while with the lockdowns declared by almost all of the states.

Bolsonaro, by contrast, openly condemned the lockdowns declared by the various Brazilian states and ostentatiously disobeyed them. He held rallies and took crowd baths. He swiped his nose on the back of his hand and then shook hands with a fragile old lady. He showed up at a barbecue on a Jet Ski.

May 3, 2017

He has fired two successive health ministers since January because they were taking the pandemic too seriously and hindering Brazilians’ return to work. He joined a street protest calling for a return to the military dictatorship that finally fell in 1985. He regularly vilifies the poor, the left, Indigenous Brazilians, gays and non-whites.

And he is currently presiding over a pandemic that will probably kill over 100,000 Brazilians without lifting a finger to stop it.

Yet in late 2018 he won the presidential election in the first round with 55 per cent of the vote, and his character was hardly a secret even before the election. A recent poll showed that his popularity is now down to 32 per cent, so Brazilians have noticed that something is wrong with him, but it still verges on the inexplicable. Or does it?

The electorate that voted for Bolsonaro in 2018 was little changed from the one that gave Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva, the absolute antithesis of Bolsonaro, two terms in the presidency immediately before him. Just as the American electorate that put Trump in office in 2016 was little changed from the one that elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. (Gwynne Dyer – Hamilton Spectator) 

 

Saturday December 7, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday December 7, 2019

With Sewergate, too many Hamilton councillors still don’t get it

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

That line, borrowed from the classic 1967 Paul Newman movie “Cool Hand Luke,” can actually be applied to the situation that continues to fester in Hamilton. Yes, we’re talking about Sewergate.

November 26, 2019

Another way to put it would be that we have a fundamental disconnect. And another: They just don’t get it.

We’re referring to the gulf that now exists between most members of Hamilton city council and the constituents who elected them. Those same constituents who are still talking and writing about Sewergate. In barbershops and salons, in coffee shops and bars. Chances are, if you go to a place where people congregate and talk, this is one of the things they’ll be talking about.

The number of published letters to the editor is now officially a record in modern memory. And those are just the ones suitable for print. Many others were not, for reasons of length, language or extreme viewpoints. And they keep coming, although they’ve slowed now to a handful each day. We will continue to print them where appropriate, but they’ll be mixed with letters on other subjects to reflect a fair balance of what readers are saying.

The point is, Hamilton citizens, in record numbers, show no interest in getting over this. They are, by and large, unsatisfied. They want to see some action. They want to see consequences. Like what? Spectator city columnist Andrew Dreschel will explore that question in a column coming Monday.

November 23, 2019

At any rate, that’s the citizen/taxpayer/constituent side of the equation. Far on the other side of that perception gulf are the members of council who apparently still don’t see what all the fuss is about. They are content to stick with their original defence: They had legal advice that said they would be putting taxpayers at more risk by disclosing the 24-billion litre sewage leak into Chedoke Creek and Cootes Paradise. Armed with that advice, they decided, repeatedly, that they should not inform the public about the spill. Not that it was much larger than originally reported. Not that the contamination took place over four and a half years.

Not that at one point E. coli levels in Chedoke Creek spiked to 900 times higher than safe levels for paddling. That’s 9,000 times higher than the threshold for safe swimming.

They say they intended to report to the public once the provincial investigation into the leak was complete. When would that have been? No one knows. The Spectator reported on the leak two weeks ago, but this council knew about it for nine months before that. How much longer would Sewergate have remained secret had The Spec not reported on it?

November 27, 2019

Here is what many city councillors just don’t get. They are sorry, they say, that the leak happened. Good for them. We’re all sorry. Probably the people involved with the original mistake are sorry. Everyone and their dog is sorry the accident happened, and was not detected for a ridiculous period of time.

But that’s not what most people are most angry about. It’s the failure to disclose that’s driving people nuts. Too many councillors don’t seem to get that secrecy has justifiably rattled peoples’ trust in city hall. Yes, because of the spill. But more so because if something like this happens again, how can citizens feel confident they will get appropriate disclosure?

Some councillors say Sewergate is a media-generated event. Fair enough. We’re not going to dignify that with a response. But we would recommend that at minimum, these councillors, who seem increasingly insulated from public opinion, take some time and find out how people are really feeling. They might want to start trying to bridge that perception gulf. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)