Six on History: The 'Rona
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1) Dear unvaccinated: Bye! And don’t let the door hit you in the . . . well, you know, Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald
"It is not yet after the pandemic
but most of us have bared our faces
in public. Most of us are a little haptic
though we remain somewhat wary
of strangers merging in enclosures &
what does it mean, to gather? To take up
from a resting place. We are so tired.
We are uncovered & mustering
strength. Never mind my mother’s
post-stroke slurred speech & vertigo,
her ear crystals misaligned, her
neck brace. We are survivors of the
panic wars. We are reaching new
conclusions intuitively from inferences
about hugging. My radar is broken.
I’m not sure where to put all my limbs.
When they’re tangled with yours it’s not
a problem. Your failing configurations
of attention. My bad knees. To draw
fabric into puckers: pleated pants,
rumpled sheets, your fingers hooked
in my underpants & we bring together
all the parts of ourselves to embrace—
haul in our bodies. To harvest, like
clusters of ripened cherry tomatoes
still warm from the sun. Forget
the kale, stripped bare by bright-
green cabbage worms congregating
on thick stems. To summon everyone
back to this abundant & skeletal planet
after we’ve jettisoned the billionaires
into space. We celebrate the launch
with tiny coupes of champagne.
To throw open the doors & host
guests & board packed planes where
everyone is cranked & cranky about
proximity still. But look at the skyline—
clutches of buildings reaching for
billows of clouds. To assemble
in a sequence for binding, somewhere
past contact tracing. Gather is
a transitive verb."
"Conservative groups are funding protests against “critical race theory.” Now we learn, thanks to investigative reporting by the Washington Post, that the rightwing libertarian Koch network is funding parent protests against mask mandates. Billionaire Charles Koch has blood on his hands by supporting and encouraging parent opposition to mask mandates in schools.
Isaac Stanley-Becker writes in the Post:
The letter sounds passionate and personal.
It is motivated, the author explains, by a desire to “speak up for what is best for my kids.” And it fervently conveys the author’s feelings to school leaders: “I do not believe little kids should be forced to wear masks, and I urge you to adopt a policy that allows parental choice on this matter for the upcoming school year.”
But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.
That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the latest salvo in an inflamed debate over mask requirements in schools, which have become the epicenter of partisan battles over everything from gender identity to critical race theory. The political melee engulfing educators has complicated efforts to reopen schools safely during a new wave of the virus brought on by the highly transmissible delta variant.
The document offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a well-financed conservative campaign to undermine regulations that health authorities say are necessary to contain the coronavirus. The frustration of many parents who want a greater say is deeply felt, school superintendents say. But their anger is also being fueled by organized activists whose influence is ordinarily veiled.
Conservative groups are trying to throw public schools into turmoil and discredit them. We have yet to see them inveighing against vaccines for polio, smallpox, measles, etc. If children get COVID, are hospitalized, and worse, this is the result of their cynical effort to make Public schools unsafe and expose children to danger.
If only it were possible to hold them accountable for endangering other people’s children.
This is the letter that the conservative Independent Women’s Forum has circulated:
Dear _____: NAME is excited to be joining NAME OF SCHOOL this year. But I want to share my thoughts on a topic I feel strongly about: masks on kids. I do not believe little kids should ... "
Kevin McKechnie is a family doctor in Nelson, B.C.
"Nelson is the bucolic mountain town in the Southern Interior of B.C. where I’ve had the privilege of working as a rural family physician for more than a decade. My colleagues and I practise a vanishing style of medicine that allows us to look after patients of all ages, through all stages, in both the community and in hospital. The work is gratifying and richly rewarding, and I never thought I’d question my plans to live out my career here. Sadly, events of the past few weeks have left me wondering.
Until very recently, the pandemic largely spared our community. Owing to our remote location, and blind luck, case counts remained low. I had one patient who spent five weeks in ICU, but his case was an exception, and the scattered handful of local cases were generally mild and self-resolving. Our hospital was not overcapacity, our workloads not overly burdensome and a will to overcome the pandemic seemed to draw the community together. Then, a few weeks ago, everything changed.
Since the beginning of August, Nelson and its surrounding communities have seen an exponential upsurge in COVID-19 cases. Our ICU is overcapacity, our hospital is full, our emergency department is seeing record daily visits, and our testing site can’t keep up with daily demand. Worse still, modelling data suggest case numbers could continue to climb for the next four to five months. Almost all local patients requiring hospitalization for COVID-19 have been unvaccinated, and public-health data demonstrate that the continuing spread is perpetuated almost entirely through those who have chosen not to get vaccinated.
My work as a family doc in this town has consequently become much more challenging. Today, typical of most days this past month, I started early and finished late. In addition to countless other encounters, I attempted to get an unvaccinated 23-year-old woman with worsening COVID-19 to the ICU, but failed because all the ventilators are in use. I called a patient to tell her that her aneurysm surgery has been indefinitely postponed because the hospital has no more capacity. I started an ordinarily resilient and vivacious patient on antidepressants, because after 18 months of trying to remain optimistic about his future, he is sinking. I witnessed a member of our clinic staff being verbally abused by an irate and indignant patient, offended at our clinic’s mask policy. I was asked to write a “medical exemption” letter for a patient with no significant medical condition. I attempted to reassure a pregnant mother, terrified about delivering in our COVID-positive hospital. I cancelled a planned house call (for the second time) with a bed-bound stroke victim, who wanted to discuss Medical Assistance in Dying, because I got called back to hospital at the end of my clinic day."
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I care deeply about this town and the people in it. I am committed to providing my patients the highest-quality medicine I know how to deliver. I’m careful not to let bias or differences of opinion affect the care I provide. I am prepared to work as tirelessly as necessary to help get this pandemic under control and restore our town to a semblance of its previous idyllic self.
Unfortunately, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my motivation. My non-judgmental approach is beginning to wane. I’m becoming exhausted and profoundly demoralized. The personal and professional toll on me, my colleagues and all those working in the health-care sector of our community is enormous.
We have, in vaccines, a tool to put an end to all of this. The data are irrefutable. Should a sufficient number of the unvaccinated get inoculated, we could get our surging local outbreak under control in a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, our town continues to have one of the lowest vaccination rates in the province, and opposition to a vaccine passport program is vocal and strident.
I implore the unvaccinated citizens of our community, and similar communities elsewhere, to step up and do the right thing. Denying the reality of what my colleagues and I are seeing daily is untruthful, demoralizing and harmful. Please prioritize the health of the people around you. Please put aside specious arguments about the erosion of civil liberties or the sanctity of personal health information until we’re at last free of this devastating crisis. We are not being asked to go to war. We are simply being asked to acknowledge real-life evidence, trust in proven science and take a shot in the arm.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to plug away in our hospital and in my clinic, and do what small things I can to help those affected by this pandemic. I’ll remain hopeful that our town will get itself back on track, and that tolerance, respect and compassion will become the defining characteristics of our community, once again. I love my town, and I’d really like to stick around."
"There seems to be a glaring illogic to official arguments about the need to vaccinate British children against Covid that no one in the corporate media wishes to highlight.
Days ago the British government’s experts on vaccinations, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, withstood strong political pressure and decided not to recommend vaccinating children aged between 12 and 15. That was because the JCVI concluded that vaccination could not be justified in the case of children on health grounds.
The implication was that the known health risks associated with vaccination for children – primarily from heart inflammation – outweighed the health benefits. The JCVI also indicated that there might be unknown, longer-term health risks too, given the lack of follow-up among young people and children who have already been vaccinated.
But while the JCVI defied the government, they did not entirely ignore the political demands of them. They offered the government’s four chief medical officers a get-out clause that could be exploited to rationalise the approval of child vaccinations: they conceded that vaccinations might offer other, non-health benefits.
September 12th 2021
89 Retweets187 LikesPredictably, this utilitarian justification for child vaccinations has been seized on by the British government. Here is the Guardian uncritically regurgitating the official position:
'There have also been concerns about the indirect effects of the virus on children. The biggest has been the disruption to schools, which had a severe impact on their mental and physical health, as well as their education.
That, essentially, is why the four CMOs have said children aged between 12 and 15 should be eligible for the jab.
They believe that being vaccinated will reduce the risk of disruption to school and extracurricular activities and the effect of this on their mental health and wellbeing.'
Let’s unpack that argument.
Covid poses no serious threat to the overwhelming majority of children, the JCVI and the chief medical officers are agreed. (Those few children who are at risk can be vaccinated under existing rules.)
But, according to the government, Covid has inflicted physical, mental and educational suffering on children because classrooms had to be shut for prolonged periods to protect vulnerable adults in the period before the adult population could be vaccinated.
Now most adults, and almost all vulnerable adults, are vaccinated against Covid, offering them a significant degree of protection.
But still children need to be injected with a vaccine that may, on balance, do more harm to their health than good.
If this is the official argument, we should all be asking: Why?
Two scenariosThere are two potential scenarios for assessing this argument.
The first:
The vaccine works against transmission and severe illness in adults. Schools therefore no longer need to be shut down to protect the adult population. Adults are now largely safe – unless they have decided not to get vaccinated. And that, in turn, means that “indirect” harm to children’s mental and physical wellbeing caused by school closures should no longer be a consideration.
If this is the case, then there are no grounds – either health ones or indirect, non-health ones – to justify vaccinating children.
The second:
The vaccine doesn’t stop transmission and severe illness, but it reduces some transmission and mitigates the worst effects of Covid. This is what the evidence increasingly suggests.
If this is the case, then vaccinating children will not only fail to stop a proportion of them catching and transmitting Covid but it will also fail in its stated purpose: preventing the future closure of schools and the associated, indirect harms to children.
Worse, at the same time vaccination may increase children’s risk of damage to their health from the vaccine itself, as the JCVI’s original conclusion implies.
Speculative benefitsNeither scenario offers persuasive medical, or even non-medical, grounds for vaccinating children. A speculative, marginal benefit to the adult population is being prioritised over the rights of children to enjoy bodily autonomy and to avoid being subjected to medical experiments that may have either short-term or long-term effects on their health.
September 6th 2021
53 Retweets84 LikesJust to be clear, as the “follow the science” crowd prepare yet again to be outraged, these are not my arguments. They are implicit in the official reasoning of the experts assessing whether to vaccinate children. They have been ignored on political grounds, because the government would prefer to look like it is actively getting us “back to normal”, and because it has chosen to put all its eggs in the easy (and profitable) vaccine basket.
If vaccines are all that is needed to solve the pandemic, then there is no need to look at other things, such as the gradual dismantling of the National Health Service by successive governments, very much including the current one; our over-consumption economies; nutrient-poor diets promoted by the farming and food industries; and much else besides.
Unadulterated racismThere are, in fact, much more obvious, unequivocal reasons to oppose vaccinating children – aside from the matter that vaccination subordinates children’s health to the adult population’s wellbeing on the flimsiest of pretexts.
First, vaccination doses wasted on British children could be put to far better use vaccinating vulnerable populations in the Global South. There are good self-interested reasons for us to back this position, especially given the fact that the fight is against a global pandemic in a modern world that is highly interconnected.
But more altruistic – and ethical – concerns should also be at the forefront of discussions too. Our lives aren’t more important than those of Africans or Asians. To think otherwise – to imagine that we deserve a third or fourth booster shot or need to vaccinate children to reduce the risk of Covid deaths in the west to near-zero – is pure, unadulterated racism.
And second, a growing body of medical reseach indicates that natural immunity confers stronger, longer-lasting protection against Covid.
Given that the virus poses little medical threat to children, the evidence so far suggests they would be better off catching Covid, as apparently half of them already have.
That is both because it serves their own interests by developing in them better immunity against future, nastier variants; and because it serves the interests of the adults around them – assuming (and admittedly it’s a big assumption) that the goal here is not to have adults dependent on endless booster shots to prevent waning immunity and enrich Pfizer.
Worst of both worldsBy contrast, the approach the British government is pursuing – and most of the corporate media is cheerleading – is the worst of both worlds.
British officials want to treat Covid as a continuing menace to public health, one that apparently can never be eradicated. A state of permanent emergency means the government can accrue to itself ever increasing powers, including for surveillance, on the pretext that we are in an endless war against the virus.
But at the same time the government’s implicit “zero tolerance” approach to Covid – in this case, a futile ambition to prevent any hospitalisations or deaths from the virus in the UK – means that the interests of British children, and populations in foreign countries we helped to impoverish through our colonial history, can be sacrificed for the good of adults in rich western countries.
September 6th 2021
51 Retweets100 LikesThe combined effect of these two approaches is to foster a political climate in which western governments and the corporate media are better placed to replicate the colonial policy priorities they have traditionally pursued abroad but this time apply them to the home front.
The supposed war against the virus – a war that children apparently must be recruited to fight on our behalf – rather neatly echoes the earlier, now discredited and unravelling “war on terror”.
Both can be presented as threats to our civilisation. Both require the state to redirect vast resources to corporate elites (the “defence” industries and now Big Pharma). Both have led to widespread fear among the populace, making it more compliant. Both require a permanent state of emergency and the sacrifice of our liberties. Both have been promoted in terms of a bogus humanitarianism. And neither war can be won.
Dog eat dogRecognising these parallels is not the same as denial, though the government and media have every interest to cultivate this as an assumption. There were and are terrorists, even if the term readily gets mangled to serve political agendas. And there is a dangerous virus that vulnerable populations need protection from.
But just as the “terror” threat arose in response to – and to mask – our arrogant, colonial control over, and plundering of, other people’s resources, so this pandemic threat appears to have arisen, in large part, from our arrogant invasion of every last habitat on the planet, and our ever less healthy, consumption-driven lifestyles.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote an article that went viral called “A lesson coronavirus is about to teach the world“. In it, I argued that our capitalist societies, with their dog-eat-dog ideologies, were the least suited to deal with a health crisis that required solidarity, both local and global.
March 17th 2020
250 Retweets322 LikesI noted that Donald Tump, then the US president, was trying to secure an early, exclusive deal for a “silver bullet” – a vaccine – whose first doses he planned to reserve for Americans as a vote-winner at home and then use as leverage over other states to reward those who complied with his, or possibly US, interests. The planet could be divided into friends and foes – those who received the vaccine and those who were denied it.
It was a typically Trumpian vanity project that he did not realise. But in many ways, it has come to pass in a different fashion and in ways that have the potential to be more dangerous than I could foresee.
Divide and ruleThe vaccine has indeed been sold as a silver bullet, a panacea that lifts from our shoulders not just the burden of lockdowns and masks but the need for any reflection on what “normal life” means and whether we should want to return to it.
And just as Trump wanted to use vaccine distribution as a tool of divide-and-rule, the vaccination process itself has come to serve a similar end. With the quick roll-out of vaccines, our societies have almost immediately divided between those who demand vaccine passports and mandates as the price for inclusion and those who demand the protection of basic liberties and cultivation of social solidarity without conditions.
In popular discourse, of course, this is being spun as a fight between responsible vaxxers and irresponsible anti-vaxxers. That is more divide-and-rule nonsense. Those in favour of vaccination, and those who have been vaccinated, can be just as concerned about the direction we are heading in as the “anti-vaxxers”.
Fear has driven our division: between those who primarily fear the virus and those who primarily fear western elites whose authoritarian instincts are coming to the fore as they confront imminent economic and environmental crises they have no answers for.
Increasingly, where we stand on issues surrounding the pandemic has little to do with “the science” and relates chiefly to where each of us stands on that spectrum of fear.
Hoarding impulseThe vaccination of children highlights this most especially, which is why I have chosen to focus on it. We want children vaccinated not because the research suggests they need it or society benefits from it but because knowing they are vaccinated will still our fear of the virus a little more.
Similarly, we want foreigners denied the vaccine – and that is the choice we make when we prioritise our children being vaccinated and demand booster shots for ourselves – because that too will allay our fears.
We hoard the vaccinations, just as we once did toilet paper. We try to fortify our borders against the virus, just as we do against “immigrants”, even though the rational part of our brain knows that the virus will lap up on our shores, in new variants, unless poorer nations are in a position to vaccinate their populations too.
Our fears, the politicians’ power complexes and the corporations’ profit motives combine to fuel this madness. And in the process we intensify the dog-eat-dog ideology we call western civilisation.
We turn on each other, we prioritise ourselves over the foreigner, we set parent against child, we pit the vaccinated against the unvaccinated – all in the name of a bogus humanitarianism and solidarity."
LISBON — "Portugal’s vaccination campaign is almost over now, and it has exceeded even the wildest goals. Nearly an entire nation trusted in the science, officials say. At mass immunization centers, just the last trickle of teenagers is passing through. Some 85 percent of Portugal’s population is fully vaccinated — aside from tiny Gibraltar, the highest rate in the world.
“We have actually run out of adults to give shots to,” said Lurdes Costa e Silva, the chief nurse at a Lisbon vaccine center that is already half-shuttered.
The emerging answer is promising — mostly. In Portugal, every indicator of pandemic severity is quickly trending downward. The death rate is half the European Union average and nine times below that of the United States.
The prime minister this week is set to reopen nightclubs and lift the mandatory 2 a.m. closing time for bars, on the path to what he calls “total freedom.” In reality, though, some precautions will remain. Mask-wearing indoors will still be mandatory in some indoor situations. Digital health certificates will continue to be necessary for travel and events with crowds.
Perhaps the most telling sign of Portugal’s lingering unease is this: Many health officials are still worried about a winter wave, and a rise in hospitalizations. And they are still worried about the vulnerability of the elderly to the ravages of the virus. In Portugal, seniors are vaccinated at a level verging on the statistically impossible: Official data puts the rate at 100 percent. But many were also vaccinated more than half a year ago — and studies from around the world, from the United States to Israel, have warned of a drop in protection by that point.
The staff at the nursing home, whose blood was also tested, still had detectable antibodies. But more than one-third of the residents had lost antibodies entirely.
Jocelyne Demengeot, 58, the lead investigator at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science, described the finding as a marker of something “not optimal.”
But across Lisbon, in a windy hilltop military facility, Portugal’s much-admired vaccine czar was worried about something else entirely.
To Henrique Gouveia e Melo, most of the information arriving about the elderly was overwhelmingly reassuring. Even six months in, they weren’t filling hospital beds. Case levels among seniors were falling still.
The naval vice admiral had spent much of his career measuring risks, and he felt the biggest risk for Portugal required a bigger-picture view.
On one of the three computer screens at his desk, he pulled up a chart showing vaccination levels, country by country. The rates in many Western countries were decent to good, still rising slowly. But then he stopped on two former Portuguese colonies, Angola and Mozambique.
In both places, like in many African nations, vaccination rates remain in the single digits — potentially giving breathing room to rampant infections and new variants capable of evading vaccines and racing around the world.
Gouveia e Melo pointed at his screen.
“These countries will have their revenge on us,” he said.
While the explanations for Portugal’s vaccine success go far beyond one person — the country has fairly centrist politics and a long-standing trust in other vaccines — doctors note that the campaign was stumbling out of the gates, until Gouveia e Melo took over, demanded things be done his way, and drew up a strategy of big vaccination hubs and clear public statements.
From that point on, he became the country’s urgent, irreplicable voice: a 6-foot-4 submariner who’d spent four years of his life underwater, who had a side interest in drones, and who now obsessed over the cold metrics of vaccine deliveries, efficiency and declining mortality.
He delivered his message night after night in Portuguese TV studios, dressed in military fatigues to convey the sense of a war. In March, as news about rare blood clots linked to AstraZeneca’s vaccine threw Europe into a panic, Gouveia e Melo tried to put the risk in context. He described two roads, one for those who chose the vaccine and the other for those who chose to wait. On the road for the vaccinated, a sniper would kill one of every 500,000, Gouveia e Melo said. On the road for the unvaccinated, a sniper would kill one of every 500.
“So,” he said, “which road do you want?”
But now, Gouveia e Melo said, the situation was different. He thought Portugal’s best move would be to focus on helping others — not just for “moral” reasons, but for its own safety. He called the idea of booster shots “stupid.” To him, the domestic mission was over — and his task force, disbanded this week, was no longer needed. Portugal had earned an opportunity to help elsewhere.
“You cannot win just by vaccinating everyone in your own country,” he said. “The war ends after we give shots to everyone in the world.”
At one of the same nursing homes that had offered blood to the researchers, two scientists arrived last month, driving an hour north from Lisbon, delivering the news that had no certain interpretation. The scientists offered the nursing home director a slide show presentation, and one of the last slides showed the chart: Thirty-seven percent of the residents were now without antibodies.
“This doesn’t mean they are not protected,” the director, Joaquim Moura, remembered the scientists saying.
But Moura was left to weigh the information. Even if Portugal might soon introduce booster shots for the elderly — as the United States, Britain, France and Germany have done — what should change in the interim? How, yet again, to weigh the risks?
For the 89 residents of the Social Assistance Center of Runa, vaccination had been transformative. It relieved the extraordinary fear of a catastrophe, the sort that had unfolded in other facilities across the country and around the world.
Just as important, vaccination had allowed the center to reopen its doors. People who had been cut off from their families — falling into depression, “losing their taste for life,” Moura said — were now seeing their children. Many took shuttle trips to the nearby mall. Graça Carita, 85, who had been widowed at age 38, went on a date. Francisco Pratas, 83, who last year had taken to driving his car around the nursing home parking lot just to protect its engine, now was able to exit the gates and drive to the beach.
“By doing those kinds of things,” Pratas said, “our lives are reborn.”
Some of the residents who’d lost antibodies were too frail to receive the news themselves, so the facility’s head nurse sent emails to their families. The emails were measured, and didn’t suggest that any dramatic changes were necessary, but said there was a “bigger need to reinforce protection measures already in place” — mask-wearing, hand washing and distancing.
The nurse provided a similar message to the residents he met with in person, including Maria Apolinia, 88, and her husband, João Lopes Neves, 90. Each was then left to make their own decisions about whether or how to adjust their behavior.
Maria and João have been married for 62 years, and even during the worst locked-down days of the pandemic, they had one another. His health was worse than hers, so they slept in separate wings, but they spent the day together, from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., sometimes sitting at a reading table, sharing the newspaper.
But until getting vaccinated, they had been cut off from their three children and seven grandchildren, whose achievements and growth were happening out of view. Even months after that contact has been restored, after many visits to their daughters’ homes for meals of beef and rabbit, Maria tears up almost immediately at the memory of last year.
So when the nursing home told them the news — Maria still had antibodies, but João did not — they talked briefly. Maria says she felt “sad.” But João brushed it off. They agreed it was too much of a sacrifice to be careful and again lose the things that mattered. Maybe the booster shots were coming, maybe not, but they kept scheduling lunches with their children, even if the risks had slightly changed.
“We’re going again this Sunday,” Maria said."
