Category Archives: Political Will

The partisan divide in coronavirus vaccinations is widening

Posted on by • Posted in Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Clinical Research, Clinical Research Funding, Coronavirus, Coronavirus Mutation, Decision Making, Disinformation, Evidence-Based Care, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Misinformation, Mistrust, Mortality, Pandemic, Partisanship, Political Will, Politics, Public Health, Scientists, Sign of the Times, State of the Union, Transparency, Trust, Vaccination, Vaccine, Vaccine Development, Vaccine Distribution, Vaccine Efficacy, Vaccine Hesitancy Rate, Vaccine Safety, Vaccine Skepticism, Vaccine Supply • Leave a comment
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/27/partisan-divide-coronavirus-vaccinations-is-widening/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2LgzPoK3ON8mpnChDBMnT5WNtT3bkd9AaOu0LUAkkU0iI_d5cw82_3cBY

One hesitates to elevate obviously bad arguments, even to point out how bad they are. This is a conundrum that comes up a lot these days, as members of the media measure the utility of reporting on bad faith, disingenuous or simply bizarre claims.

If someone were to insist, for example, that they were not going to get the coronavirus vaccine solely to spite the political left, should that claim be elevated? Can we simply point out how deranged it is to refuse a vaccine that will almost certainly end an international pandemic simply because people with whom you disagree think that maybe this is a good route to end that pandemic? If someone were to write such a thing at some attention-thirsty website, we certainly wouldn’t want to link to it, leaving our own readers having to figure out where it might be found should they choose to do so.

In this case, it’s worth elevating this argument (which, to be clear, is actually floating out there) to point out one of the myriad ways in which the effort to vaccinate as many adults as possible has become interlaced with partisan politics. As the weeks pass and demand for the vaccine has tapered off, the gap between Democratic and Republican interest in being vaccinated seems to be widening — meaning that the end to the pandemic is likely to move that much further into the future.

Consider, for example, the rate of completed vaccinations by county, according to data compiled by CovidActNow. You can see a slight correlation between how a county voted in 2020 — the horizontal axis — and the density of completed vaccinations, shown on the vertical. There’s a greater density of completed vaccinations on the left side of the graph than on the right.

If we shift to the percentage of the population that’s received even one dose of the vaccine, the effect is much more obvious.

This is a relatively recent development. At the beginning of the month, the density of the population that had received only one dose resulted in a graph that looked much like the current density of completed doses.

If we animate those two graphs, the effect is obvious. In the past few weeks, the density of first doses has increased much faster in more-Democratic counties.

If we group the results of the 2020 presidential contest into 20-point buckets, the pattern is again obvious.

It’s not a new observation that Republicans are less willing to get the vaccine; we’ve reported on it repeatedly. What’s relatively new is how that hesitance is showing up in the actual vaccination data.

A Post-ABC News poll released on Monday showed that this response to the vaccine holds even when considering age groups. We’ve known for a while that older Americans, who are more at risk from the virus, have been more likely to seek the vaccine. But even among seniors, Republicans are significantly more hesitant to receive the vaccine than are Democrats.

This is a particularly dangerous example of partisanship. People 65 or older have made up 14 percent of coronavirus infections, according to federal data, but 81 percent of deaths. That’s among those for whom ages are known, a subset (though a large majority) of overall cases. While about 1.8 percent of that overall group has died, the figure for those aged 65 and over is above 10 percent.

As vaccines have been rolled out across the country, you can see how more-heavily-blue counties have a higher density of vaccinations in many states.

This is not a universal truth, of course. Some heavily Republican counties have above-average vaccination rates. (About 40 percent of counties that preferred former president Donald Trump last year are above the average in the CovidActNow data. The rate among Democratic counties is closer to 80 percent.) But it is the case that there is a correlation between how a county voted and how many of its residents have been vaccinated. It is also the case that the gap between red and blue counties is widening.

Given all of that, it probably makes sense to point out that an argument against vaccines based on nothing more than “lol libs will hate this” is an embarrassing argument to make.

Report American Billionaires have added more than 1 trillion in wealth during pandemic

Posted on by • Posted in Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Economic Stimulus, Political Culture, Political Differences, Political Lobbying, Political Pressure, Political Will, Politics, Trickle Down Economics, Wealth, Windfall Profits • Leave a comment
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/26/report-american-billionaires-have-added-more-than-1-trillion-in-wealth-during-pandemic/?sh=42ddb3c02564&fbclid=IwAR02_4m3nNJXrC_ES-8EuwGI7Xqn12SH5EhxYqT5Eu-d6HnV3WcWH4hcQ8I
Report: American Billionaires Have Added More Than $1 Trillion In Wealth During Pandemic

America’s billionaires have added a staggering $1.1 trillion to their collective wealth since the pandemic began. Their combined fortunes now sit at $4.1 trillion — $1.7 trillion more than the amount of wealth held by the bottom half of Americans.

Meanwhile, the country’s poverty rate increased by 2.4 percentage points in the latter half of 2020 — the largest increase in poverty since the 1960s. And to think that Senate Republicans are decrying a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill as too expensive.

Please. America’s billionaires alone could finance most of that bill, just with the increase in their wealth over the last 10 months. An emergency wealth tax that used their $1.1 trillion windfall to pay for the COVID survival plan would put these billionaires back to where they were 10 months ago (still very comfortable, to say the least) while helping the rest of America survive.

This is the sort of trickle-down economics that could actually work. What do you think?

Public’s disconnect from COVID-19 reality worries experts

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Accountability, Clinical Research, Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Economy Reopening, Evidence-based Leadership, Evidence-Based Plan, Evidence-Based Policy, Failed Repeatedly, Failure, False Hope, False Narrative, Front Lines, Healthcare Providers, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Leadership Will, Misinformation, Mislead, Misleading, Mixed Message, Mortality, National Strategy, Pandemic, Partisanship, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Political Will, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Scientists, Social Distancing, Supply Chain, Transparency, Vaccination, Vaccine, Worker Protection • Leave a comment

Public’s disconnect from COVID-19 reality worries experts

Public's disconnect from COVID-19 reality worries experts | TheHill

The United States is being ravaged by a deadly pandemic that is growing exponentially, overwhelming health care systems and costing thousands of lives, to say nothing of an economic recession that threatens to plague the nation for years to come.

But the American public seems to be over the pandemic, eager to get kids back in schools, ready to hit the bar scene and hungry for Major League Baseball to play its abbreviated season.

 

The startling divergence between the brutal reality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the fantasy land of a forthcoming return to normalcy has public health experts depressed and anxious about what is to come. The worst is not behind us, they say, by any stretch of the imagination.

 

“It’s an absolute disconnect between our perceived reality and our actual reality,” said Craig Spencer, a New York City emergency room doctor who directs global health in emergency medicine at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. “To look at the COVID case count and the surge in cases and to think that we can have these discussions as we have uncontrolled spread, to think we can have some national strategy for reopening schools when we don’t even have one for reopening the country, it’s just crazy.”

The number of dead from the virus in the United States alone, almost 136,000, is roughly equal to the populations of Charleston, S.C., or Gainesville, Fla. If everyone in America who had been infected lived in the same city, that city would be the third-largest in the country, behind only New York and Los Angeles. More people in the United States have tested positive for the coronavirus than live in the state of Utah. By the weekend, there are likely to be more confirmed coronavirus cases than there are residents of Connecticut.

There are signs that the outbreak is getting worse, not better. The 10 days with the highest number of new coronavirus infections in the United States have come in the past 11 days.

Case counts, hospitalizations and even deaths are on the rise across the nation, not only in Southern states that were slow to embrace lockdowns in March and April.

California, the first state to completely lock down, has reported more than 54,000 new cases over both of the last two weeks. Nevada, about one-thirteenth the size of California, reported 5,200 new cases last week. States where early lockdowns helped limit the initial peak like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio are all seeing case counts grow and hospital beds fill up.

Only two states — Maine and New Jersey — have seen their case counts decline for two consecutive weeks.

 

“We are nearing the point where pretty much most of the gains we had achieved have been lost,” said Christine Petersen, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa. “All of us are hoping we magically get our acts together and we can look like Europe in two months. But all the data shows we are not doing that right now.”

It is in that dismal context that schools are preparing some sort of return to learning, whether in person or remote. President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have threatened schools that do not fully reopen.

But even though the coronavirus appears to have less severe consequences among children, sending them back to schools en masse does not carry zero risk. Children have died from the virus, and the more who are exposed mean more opportunities for the virus to kill again, even before considering the millions of teachers who may be vulnerable or the parents and grandparents asymptomatic children might be exposed to.

Already, school districts in Los Angeles and San Diego have delayed reopening plans as case counts rise.

“We do know that kids can get sick and they can even die. It’s definitely a much lower number,” Petersen said. “Even if they aren’t as infectious, if there are millions of them gathering in schools not having great hygiene, it’s a multiplier effect.”

 

The painful lockdowns that were supposed to reduce viral transmissions bought time to bolster testing and hospital capacity, to speed production of the equipment needed to test patients and protect front-line health care workers.

But that hasn’t happened; laboratories in the United States have tested as many as 823,000 people in a day, a record number but far shy of the millions a day necessary to wrestle the virus under control. Arizona and Los Angeles have canceled testing appointments for lack of supplies. Hospitals are reporting new shortages of protective gear and N95 masks.

The Trump administration used the Defense Production Act to order meat processing plants to stay open; it has only awarded contracts sufficient to produce 300 million N95 masks by the end of the year, far short of what health experts believe will be necessary to protect health care workers.

 

“A failure of national leadership has led us to a place where we are back where we were before, no national testing strategy, no national strategy for supply,” said Kelli Drenner, who teaches public health at the University of Houston. “States are still on their own to scramble for reagents and swabs and PPE and all of that, still competing against each other and against nations for those resources.”

There are troubling signs that the promise of a vaccine may not be the cure-all for which many had hoped. Early studies suggest that the immune system only retains coronavirus antibodies for a few months, or perhaps a year, raising the prospect that people could become reinfected even after they recover. A growing, if still fringe, movement of anti-vaccination activists may refuse a vaccine altogether, putting others at risk.

“A vaccine is not going to solve this. People die of vaccine-preventable diseases every day. All the failures with testing and diagnostics and all the inequities and access to care with those are going to be the same things that are going to be magnified with a vaccine,” said Nita Bharti, a biologist at Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics.

 

More than a dozen states hit hardest by the latest wave of disease have paused or reversed their reopening processes. But only 24 states and the District of Columbia have ordered residents to wear masks in public, and compliance varies widely by both geography and political affiliation.

“This is the critical time. If we are going to try to reverse this, we have to get back to the mental space and the resolute action we had in March. I’m not sure we have the energy and the wherewithal to do it,” Petersen said.

 

Without a dramatic recommitment to conquering the virus, health officials warn, the new normal in which the country exists will be one of serious and widespread illness, and a steady drumbeat of death.

“None of this was inevitable. None of this should be acceptable. There are ways we can do better,” Spencer said. “This will continue to be our reality for as long as we don’t take it seriously.”

But after months of repeating the same warnings — wear a mask, stay socially distant, stay home if possible, avoid places where people congregate in tight quarters — some health experts worry their message has been lost amid a sea of doubt, skepticism and mixed signals.

“It’s like a learned helplessness when we’re not helpless,” Drenner said. “There are some pretty effective strategies, but we don’t seem to have the political will to do it.”