Author Archives: henrykotula

Experts Slam The White House’s ‘Herd Immunity’ Plan

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/mishagajewski/2020/10/14/experts-slam-the-white-houses-heard-immunity-plan/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=coronavirus&cdlcid=5d2c97df953109375e4d8b68#12a425173e49
Experts warn Trump's misinformation about coronavirus is dangerous

The White House is reportedly embracing a herd-immunity approach focused on “protecting the elderly and the vulnerable” but experts are calling the plan dangerous, “unethical”, and equivalent to “mass murder”.

The news comes following a petition titled The Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against lockdowns and school and business closures and got almost 500,000 signatures – although some of them were fake.

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration states, adding, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”

Essentially, herd immunity is when enough people are immune to a disease, like Covid-19, that the disease can’t be transmitted as easily and thus provides indirect protection.

It’s been rumoured that the government has been leaning towards this plan of action for some time now, although this is the first real admission.

In response to today’s news, experts around the world have been voicing their concerns.

And this isn’t the first time we’ve heard experts say herd immunity is not a good idea.

For example, the head of the World Health Organization said Monday that allowing the novel coronavirus to spread in an attempt to reach herd immunity was “simply unethical.”

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins also denounced herd immunity as a viable plan.

“What I worry about with this is it’s being presented as if it’s a major alternative view that’s held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community. That is not true. This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment,” he said in an interview.

Not to mention studies continue to show that Sweden’s attempts at herd immunity have failed and have resulted in a higher Covid-19 death toll than expected.

As more research comes out, scientists are starting to learn that Covid-19 immunity, even in those who were severely infected, can fade after a few weeks.

This is why we’ve seen cases of reinfection and why many experts are advising against a herd immunity plan.  

Currently less than 10% of the population in the U.S. are immune to Covid-19 but for herd immunity to be achieved most experts estimate between 40% to 80% of the population would need to be infected.

To put that into context, that means around 197 million people would need to be infected in America. And assuming that the Covid-19 fatality rate is somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, based on numbers from the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 1 million people would die – at minimum.

William Haseltine, Chair and President of ACCESS Health International, told CNN “herd immunity is another word for mass murder. We are looking at two to six million Americans dead – not just this year but every year.”  

“This is an unmitigated disaster for our country – to have people at the highest levels of our government countermanding our best public health officials. We know this epidemic can be put under control. Other countries have done it. We are doing the opposite.”

Cartoon – Pandemic Leadership

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Blame, Cartoon, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Coronavirus, Evidence-based Leadership, Evidence-Based Plan, Evidence-Based Policy, Failed Repeatedly, Failure, False Hope, False Narrative, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Mortality, National Strategy, Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Public Health, Public Opinion, Public Perception, Public Safety, Public Trust, Scapegoat, Scientists • Leave a comment
Cartoon – Leadership Today | HENRY KOTULA

The huge return on investing in coronavirus tests

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Chronic Care Management, Chronic Conditions, Chronic Diseases, Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Mortality, Pandemic, Pharmaceutical Industry, Profit Motive, Public Health, Public Safety, Public Trust, Quarantine, Scientists, Social Distancing, Vaccine • Leave a comment
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Report: Government spending on testing and tracing pays for itself more than 30 times over - Axios

Government spending on testing and contact tracing pays for itself more than 30 times over, according to yet another paper published in JAMA (good series!).

What they found: Harvard economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers calculated the total cost of the coronavirus pandemic at more than $16 trillion in the U.S. alone. Of that, about $7 trillion is attributable to loss of life and long-term impairment from the disease, Axios’ Felix Salmon writes.

  • Enhanced testing and tracing would cost about $6 million per 100,000 inhabitants, they calculate. Out of that population, 14 lives would be saved, on which they place a value of $96 million, and 33 critical and severe cases would be avoided, representing savings of $80 million.
  • That adds up to $176 million in benefits from $6 million in costs — before taking into account any second-order effects from even fewer cases down the road.

The bottom line: “Currently, the U.S. prioritizes spending on acute treatment,” write Cutler and Summers, “with far less spending on public health services and infrastructure.”

  • Going forward, they write, “a minimum of 5% of any COVID economic relief intervention should be devoted to such health measures.”

The coming vaccine chaos

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Capitalism, Chaos, Coronavirus, Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Evidence-based Leadership, Evidence-Based Plan, Evidence-Based Policy, False Hope, False Narrative, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Mortality, National Strategy, Pandemic, Pharmaceutical Industry, Profit Motive, Public Health, Public Opinion, Public Perception, Public Safety, Public Trust, Quarantine, Scientists, Social Distancing, Vaccine, Wishful Thinking • Leave a comment
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The coming coronavirus vaccine chaos - Axios

The first coronavirus vaccine will likely get authorized within months, but that will only be the beginning of what’s likely to be a long, chaotic vaccination process, the New York Times’ Carl Zimmer reports.

The big picture: The first vaccines probably will offer only moderate protection against the virus, meaning we can’t ditch our masks even if we get one. And we probably won’t have a good way to choose between these vaccines once several of them are on the market.

  • Some vaccines that are in earlier stages of development today may struggle to cross the finish line, even if they work better than earlier vaccines.
  • And some vaccines may be pulled off of the market because they’re unsafe.

Between the lines: Some of this is inherent to the breakneck speed of the vaccination effort, but some of it is a result of how that effort was designed.

  • Earlier this year, some government scientists had wanted to test vaccine candidates against each other, instead of testing all of them against a placebo. But these kinds of trials are risky for drug companies, because they show the value of one vaccine against another.
  • That information could be useful for patients, but is a business risk for manufacturers.
  • “You have to have the total cooperation of the pharmaceutical companies to get involved in a master protocol,” top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told NYT. “That — I don’t know what the right word is — didn’t turn out to be feasible.”

The stubbornly high coronavirus death rate

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Asymptomatic Transmission, Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Evidence-based Leadership, Evidence-Based Plan, Evidence-Based Policy, Failed Repeatedly, Failure, False Hope, False Narrative, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Misinformation, Misinterpret, Mislead, Misleading, Mistake, Mistrust, Mixed Message, Mortality, National Strategy, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Opinion, Public Perception, Public Safety, Public Trust, Quarantine, Scientists, Social Distancing • Leave a comment
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The United States' stubbornly high coronavirus death rate - Axios

Although other wealthy countries have higher overall coronavirus mortality rates than the United States, the U.S. death rate since May is unrivaled among its peers, according to a new study published in JAMA.

Between the lines: After the first brutal wave of outbreaks, other countries did much better than the U.S. at learning from their mistakes and preventing more of their population from dying.

Why it matters: “If the U.S. had comparable death rates with most high-mortality countries beginning May 10, it would have had 44,210 to 104,177 fewer deaths,” the authors conclude.

  • Excess deaths have followed a similar pattern: The hardest-hit European countries had similar or higher rates of excess deaths of all causes to the U.S. early on, but these fell much lower than the America did after the first wave.

Yes, but: Death rates are not static, as this study proves, and outbreaks in several European countries have taken a turn for the worse lately.