I Gotcher Conspiracy Right here

Hey, "conservatives", do you really wanna do that conspiracy thing? Here's one.

What if you make a political move that takes cops off the streets, and do it thru the unions, which kinda short-circuits the lefties' pushback?

Put this together with - oh, I dunno - that horseshit going on down there in Texas where they've legalized Vigilantism, and whaddya got?

The Guardian:

Police departments face a shortage as unions enable officers to refuse vaccines

Representatives say the mandates violate the officers’ rights while city leaders are trying to keep the public safe

Sgt Randy Huserik and all other officers with the Seattle police department who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 are prepared to report at 7am Tuesday morning to any of the city’s five precincts rather than their usual assignments. Some detectives could even be responding to 911 calls instead of following up on their case load, he said.

That’s because the city is implementing a vaccine mandate for officers on 18 October and preparing to fire hundreds of officers who refuse to get the vaccine, which could leave the department significantly understaffed.

“We will have additional bodies available to handle 911 calls but obviously there is going to be a backlash on that for all the officers assigned as detectives who then won’t be working on their caseload, which will then back up as additional cases come in,” said Huserik, who has been with the department for 28 years and works in public affairs.

The standoff between the city and officers is just one conflict among many across the United States, with city leaders stating that they are trying to keep the public safe and some officers and their union representatives saying that the mandates violate their rights. In Chicago, the issue has even led to the mayor and the local police union trading legal actions.

While the penalties for officers who decline to get the vaccine differ from city to city, there is a common resistance among police unions to various restrictions.

And policing experts warn that even if officers’ resistance to the vaccination is misguided, issuing mandates could further deplete departments that are already understaffed and thus hurt public safety.

“I think you should encourage them, but I don’t think you can make anybody do anything and think that relationship is going to be amicable and trustworthy down the line,” said David Thomas, a professor of forensic studies at Florida Gulf Coast University.

The resistance to the vaccines comes despite the fact Covid-19 has caused 473 deaths among law enforcement officers in the United States, making it the largest cause of death for the group in 2020 and 2021, according to Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks the deaths.

“You would think that is enough to encourage everybody to get vaccinated,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which advises police departments across the country. “It’s just mind-boggling to think that the creation of [police] unions was to protect officers’ rights and what could be more significant than the right to live a good life?”

Brian Higgins, a former police chief and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, attributes the resistance in part to the fact that police “are a little more skeptical” and “are not used to being told what to do”, he said.

And there it is - the cops "are not used to being told what to do."

Well then, you need to get used to it, fellas.

You are not the law.

You are not above the law.

You will comply with the fucking law.

Today's Tweet

Dinosaur

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIS SHIT IS A REAL ANIMAL pic.twitter.com/biQONosLW7

— Santiago Mayer (@santiagomayer_) October 17, 2021

Today's Pix

click to embiggen

COVID-19 Update

A long one today. 2 stories that I think illustrate the double whammy at work. ie: the two-pronged tactic that the Daddy State uses to create a kind of circular argument that's self-reinforcing.

Governments aren't leveling with us when telling us about what's happening with - and what they're doing about - the pandemic problem.

Second, how all that lying and obfuscation is affecting people's ability to grok the importance of getting with the fucking program.

If they convince us the problem ain't no big deal, then there's no need for all the fuss over getting vaxxed, and if you're vaxxed, why should you care that I'm not, cuz it's no big deal in the first place and blah blah blah.

Authoritarians need us to stay divided. If we're allowed to get together on practically anything, we start to see each other differently - maybe not as allies, but at least we can start to see how we have something in common that makes us less than each other's enemies - and the Daddy State knows that's when they're fucked.

So - first, there's more than a little bit of suspicion that Putin's government hasn't been real honest about the COVID numbers. Color me unsurprised.

WaPo: (freebie?)

In Russia, experts are challenging official pandemic figures as too low. They refuse to be silenced.

MOSCOW — Unshaven and puffy faced, with tubes in his nose, a patient in a hospital's coronavirus "red zone" recorded a desperate message for Russians.

“I turned my life and my health into a disaster,” said Innokenty Sheremet, 55, who is from the Ural Mountain region city of Yekaterinburg and came down with covid-19 after forgoing vaccination.

“I turned into an infirm old man,” he continued, describing “terrible pain from any movement.” Many employees at his TV news agency also became infected. Sheremet survived, but his news service collapsed.

In Russia, a “fourth wave” of coronavirus is setting records in daily infection and death numbers, according to official statistics.

But the truth is far worse, say independent demographers and data analysts who are challenging the pandemic data issued by President Vladimir Putin’s government and who, in turn, are facing retribution from authorities. At least three top researchers have been dismissed or have resigned from their posts in government or at state universities amid pressure from bosses.

Russia’s official statistics showed 221,313 pandemic-related deaths by mid-October, but the independent demographer Alexey Raksha calculated that excess mortality — seen by analysts as the most reliable indicator of coronavirus deaths — has reached around 750,000. Raksha’s calculation used figures maintained by Rosstat, Russia’s statistical agency. Meanwhile, a report in the Moscow Times estimated the figure at about 660,000.

Russian independent analysts say officials manipulated statistics and underplayed the crisis, most likely for political reasons — claims that have been made about governments in other countries, including China and Turkey. Critics alleging data manipulation by governments say the practice is an obstacle to a full global reckoning of the pandemic’s reach.The Russian Ministry of Health and Rospotrebnadzor, the government agency that publishes daily coronavirus numbers, did not respond to requests for comment on allegations of low counts. Russian official statistics exclude many deaths of patients with the coronavirus where doctors judge another major factor was to blame, such as heart failure.

“The data for [Russia] is absolutely unreliable,” said Alexei Kouprianov, an independent analyst and biologist who last year organized a community of experts on social media, Watching Covid. He was fired from the St. Petersburg campus of the Higher School of Economics in September 2020.

As Putin’s government tightens political control in the country, the handling of the pandemic has largely been left to the regions. The pandemic has exposed fragilities in a system in which regional officials conceal problems for fear of losing their posts and critics — even analytical experts — are sidelined.

Before the pandemic, life expectancy in Russia was 73 years, whereas it was 84 in countries including Australia, Italy and Spain, and its spending on health care was 5.6 percent of GDP compared with 16.8 percent in the United States and more than 10 percent in Japan and much of Europe, according the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Crows sit on grave crosses in the section of a cemetery reserved for coronavirus victims
in Kolpino outside St Petersburg on Oct 12. (Dmitri Lovetsky/AP)

Russian authorities say their handling of the pandemic has been better than the performance of many Western countries. But with 43 million Russians fully vaccinated by Oct. 14, according to the Health Ministry, about 30 percent of the 144.4 million population, Russia’s vaccination rate is one of the world’s lowest, according to data from the Britain-based Global Change Data Lab. Russia’s rate compares with 56 percent in the United States, 65 percent in Britain and 72 percent in Canada.

Recently, official Russian rhetoric has shifted. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Oct. 11 that mortality rates were high because of the “unacceptably low level of vaccination,” adding that “all conditions have been provided to citizens to save their lives by getting inoculated.”

Since Russian parliamentary elections last month, officials and state media have amplified warnings about the dangers of the coronavirus. The daily coronavirus death toll hit a record 1,002 on Friday, and the country surpassed 33,000 daily infection cases, according to state-approved figures.

“Actually, excess mortality now is more than 2,000 people each day on average,” claimed the demographer Raksha, who was fired by the official statistical agency Rosstat last year for exposing alleged undercounting of daily deaths by the reporting agency Rospotrebnadzor.

“Hospitals are overloaded,” said Andrei Konoval, the head of the independent Union of Medical Workers. Ambulance drivers were ordered to work 24-hours shifts in Yekaterinburg, the independent Znak media reported. Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko on Thursday called on retired doctors to return to work.

Putin’s vaccine puzzle: Why the secrecy over his jab?

Denis Protsenko, a pro-Kremlin chief of one of Moscow’s main covid-19 hospitals, sounded the alarm Friday, calling the situation “close to critical.”

“Guys, the coronavirus is not a joke or a fiction. It is surprising that in the second year of the pandemic, people still need to be convinced of this,” he said, calling on medical colleagues to “start talking in a frank and unadorned way to our compatriots.”

Raksha said he thinks that inaccurate statistics sent a message to Russians that the pandemic had been beaten and therefore left space for covid conspiracy disinformation and anti-vaccination propaganda to flood Russian social media.

“In Russia, the covid dissidents won,” he said.

Kouprianov said covid dissidents targeting the Watching Covid social media page often cited official statistics to argue that “nothing special is happening.”

Raksha says he never uses Russia’s official daily statistics on infections and deaths, and “I don’t recommend anyone to do it.” In Russia, a regional official typically “just draws a line by hand to flatten the curve,” he said. “They are just making up numbers, literally.”

Russia’s official coronavirus numbers are relatively low. Even Moscow’s mayor is questioning the count.

One of his prized possessions is a Soviet statistical yearbook from 1987, one of only 100 copies from the period in 1974 to 1988 when demographic statistics were kept secret. He sees a parallel now: The few Russians who follow the social media pages of reliable independent analysts can find a more accurate picture.

Another independent data expert, Alexander Dragan, monitors regional coronavirus surges by tracking searches on Yandex, Russia’s search engine, and on Google. The correlation with excess mortality has been striking, he said.

Tatiana Mikhailova an economist and expert in data analysis, formerly of the prestigious Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, discovered a pattern in many Russian regions’ reporting on daily cases. Instead of the familiar pandemic curve, the overall case numbers swung wildly in regional reports. Numbers for the main city in region went up one day and the rest of the region’s numbers went down — as if the city and the wider region were taking turns in experiencing surges.

Now booming on Moscow’s black market: Fake vaccine certificates

“I discovered this strange pattern in many regions that basically told me that the official statistics are lying,” she said. “They just underreport the cases that they have so as not to show the growth of cases.”

After she published her graphs, the academy blocked her from giving interviews, and she resigned rather than be silenced.

“If you are working on issues that are critical for society, you have to speak to the press because you have to make your results known to the public,” Mikhailova said. “I think it’s your duty as a scientist.”

Doctors are afraid to speak out about the crisis, said Semyon Galperin, the head of the Doctors’ Defense League, an independent association. He said the crisis was sharpened by Russian health system reforms under which more than half the nation’s hospitals and clinics shut down between 2000 and 2015 and thousands of medical workers left the profession.

“The result of these reforms is a broken system,” he said. Unreliable information about the pandemic and vaccines made it worse, he added.

“We don’t know what is going on. Nobody can say what the exact situation is,” he said. “Nobody trusts anyone anymore.

And the mandates are working just fine, in spite of all the pearl-clutching we see from the Press Poodles.

Remember - that divide-n-conquer shit can't be made to work against us if we can think our way around the wedges the Daddy State has to drive between us.

WaPo:

Vaccine mandates stoked fears of labor shortages. But hospitals say they’re working.

At Houston Methodist — one of the first American health-care institutions to require workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — the backlash was short-lived.

More than 150 employees were fired. There were legal battles and protests. But President and CEO Marc Boom has no regrets: 98 percent of staff have been vaccinated, and they and patients are safer as a result, he said.

“I can unequivocally say [it was] the best decision we ever made,” Boom said in an interview.

Houston Methodist is not alone in requiring its employees to be vaccinated. About 41 percent of hospitals nationwide — roughly 2,570 facilities — have some sort of vaccine mandate, according to data collected by the American Hospital Association, a trade group. Others are expected to follow after President Biden announced last month that he would require most health-care facilities that accept Medicaid or Medicare funding — many of which also treat immunocompromised people who are at high risk of getting severely ill from covid — to vaccinate their employees.

Most health-care systems that require vaccination have touted widespread compliance. In interviews, administrators at some of the nation’s largest hospital systems said the mandates worked: Officials said that they have very high vaccination rates they attributed to the requirement and that they have seen coronavirus infections — and sick leaves — noticeably drop.

At Novant Health, a 35,000-employee health-care system in four Southeast states, more than 99 percent of workers have complied with a vaccine mandate, spokeswoman Caryn Klebba wrote in an email.

“Without a vaccine mandate for team members, we faced the strong possibility of having a third of our staff unable to work due to contracting, or exposure to, COVID-19,” she said. “This possibility only increases heading into a fall season with the more contagious and deadly Delta variant.”

California-based Kaiser Permanente, with 216,000 employees and 23,000 physicians, reported that more than 92 percent have been vaccinated as of Sept. 30, when staff members were required to get the shot, spokesman Marc Brown wrote in an email. About 6 percent of the workers were unvaccinated but sought exemptions, leaving 2 percent who did not comply and were placed on unpaid administrative leave, Brown said. He said since then, “many” of those workers have agreed to get vaccinated or applied for an exemption, but he did not specify a number.

In New York, a statewide vaccine mandate for health-care workers, which went into effect on Sept. 27, increased the number of people getting immunized. Ninety percent of the state’s health-care workforce is now vaccinated, according to state data. Northwell Health, the state’s largest provider, said it fired 1,400 employees — less than 2 percent of its 76,000-member workforce — for refusing to get vaccinated. Northwell said it expects no interruptions to its service as a result of the terminations.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the state must continue to allow health-care workers to request religious exemptions as a lawsuit over the state’s vaccine requirement proceeds.

But many hospitals still lack mandates, and efforts to vaccinate every eligible staff member have lagged. Some officials fear that staff members, overwhelmed from the summer delta variant surge, could remain exposed amid a potential “twindemic” of covid and flu spikes this winter.

The federal government does not require health-care facilities to share their vaccination data. But at more than 2,000 facilities nationwide that voluntarily reported numbers to the Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 1 in 4 hospital workers are unvaccinated, according to data provided last month.

CommonSpirit Health, with 137 hospitals in 21 states, said “most” employees are vaccinated ahead of a Nov. 1 deadline to respond to the system’s mandate. At CommonSpirit’s California facilities, where a statewide mandate went into effect Sept. 30, more than 90 percent of the system’s employees are vaccinated or have received an approved exemption, according to a company statement.

Even at hospitals that have not yet mandated shots, administrators have touted their vaccination rates. A spokesman for HCA Healthcare, which has 185 hospitals in 20 states and the United Kingdom, said the “majority” of its employees are vaccinated, but did not give a specific figure.

Yet the unvaccinated minority of hospital workers have drawn the public’s attention with their vocal opposition in the form of protests and lawsuits. Hospital workers have filed or joined lawsuits in at least eight states — including Oregon, Minnesota and New York — against their employers or public agencies over vaccine mandates.

Houston Methodist, too, made headlines over the summer for suspending 178 employees who did not get vaccinated — after a judge dismissed a lawsuit from 117 employees who challenged the mandate, alleging it was reminiscent of Nazi-era “nonconsensual human experimentation.”

But Boom says the headlines belie the fact that very few — less than 0.6 percent — of Houston Methodist’s 26,578 employees quit or were fired because they refused the vaccine. Ninety-eight percent are now vaccinated and 2 percent were exempt or allowed to defer, most for medical reasons, Boom said.

On Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an executive order banning any entity in Texas, including private businesses, from requiring vaccinations for employees or customers. Boom said he was “grateful” the hospital had mandated vaccinations “early so the order will not have an immediate impact.”

Jared R. Woodfill, a lawyer representing workers who were terminated, said in an interview and a letter sent to the hospital that Abbott’s order applies to his clients and they should be reinstated — an argument he said he plans to make in his ongoing lawsuits against the hospital in state and federal court. Stefanie Asin, a hospital spokeswoman, said, “There is no merit to what he is saying.” The hospital will not rehire the unvaccinated former employees, Asin said.

Boom credited the widespread vaccinations with keeping 300 workers from getting sick over the summer, according to an analysis the hospital conducted of short-term disability leaves. Staff members who did get sick with covid-19 reported less severe cases, Boom said, and no employees died over the summer. Houston Methodist lost two workers to covid-19 in summer 2020.

Patience has worn thin’: Frustration mounts over vaccine holdouts

Despite the clinical and real-world evidence that vaccination not only protect the person who gets their shots but those around them, some hospital workers have still declined to get vaccinated, leaving hospitals in some parts of the country struggling to convince them.

Arnhild Espino, a registered nurse at Legacy Mount Hood Medical Center in Gresham, Ore., was put on administrative unpaid leave on Sept. 30 for refusing to get vaccinated. She was among 794 workers — approximately 5 percent of Legacy’s 14,000 employees — who were not yet vaccinated. Espino is searching for employment elsewhere and is considering seeking a license in Florida, where vaccination requirements are lax. After Abbott’s order, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) pledged in a news conference to explore options to prevent employers from firing workers over not getting vaccinated.

“Oregon state is stripping away my livelihood and everything I hold true,” Espino said.

Since Espino and others were put on administrative leave, 114 employees have come into compliance and 97 are on their way to becoming fully vaccinated, Legacy spokeswoman Kristin Whitney said. Still, the system of six hospitals and about 70 clinics has temporarily consolidated or closed services, including CT, mammography and ultrasound, at about 10 facilities to lessen the burden on staff from employees on leave. There were 986 exemption requests, of which at least 897 were denied, according to an internal presentation shared with The Washington Post.

One nurse in Washington state, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because her employer does not allow employees to speak to the media, had initially sought an exception and was denied and suspended.

The nurse said she considered going into child care. Her family sold one of their cars and she weighed applying for food stamps. Unemployment was not available to those who lost their jobs because they declined to get vaccinated, she said.

But after taking a break from social media, praying and talking to her husband about the financial risks of losing her well-paid job, she said she changed her mind. Now, she plans to get vaccinated and return to work.

Workers leaving their jobs are also reckoning with stepping away from hospitals at a time when staffing is most needed.

When asked what a loss of 1 percent of health-care workers could look like in New Mexico — which has mandated vaccination for those employees — David Scrase, the acting head of the state’s Health Department, said the impact on an already strained system is considerable. But he added that even if unvaccinated workers kept their jobs, they could be out for long periods if they became infected and got seriously ill.

“A 1 percent impact on health-care workers in our state would mean that all the other health-care workers would have to work 1 percent harder,” he told reporters on a call last month. “They’re already working as hard as they can, so I think it’s a big deal.”

The high compliance numbers that many hospitals cite do not always tell the full story. Some hospitals are more lenient than others in granting exemptions, which may lead to a larger share of unvaccinated staff choosing to skip vaccination without losing their job.

About 10 percent of the 20,000 employees of MUSC Health, the clinical network of the Medical University of South Carolina, received permission to skip vaccination for religious or medical reasons, according to Patrick Cawley, its CEO. In a typical flu season, less than 1 percent of MUSC Health employees are exempt from the influenza vaccine, Cawley said.

Unlike some other hospitals that set up committees to examine exemption requests for merit and decide whether to grant them, MUSC Health “did not do that,” Cawley said. “I have everybody’s explanation … and at the moment we haven’t done anything with that other than accept it.”

“I do think some people probably used those exemptions more than they should have,” Cawley said.

Other hospital networks have reported small fractions of workers receiving exemptions. Less than 4 percent of UNC Health’s 30,800-person workforce were granted religious or medical exemptions, according to Matthew Ewend, the chief clinical officer of the state-owned network of 14 hospitals, 18 hospital campuses and more than 500 clinics in North Carolina.

Ninety-nine percent of the workforce is vaccinated or exempt, Ewend said, but the system could lose nearly 300 staff members if they don’t get vaccinated by Nov. 2, the end of a probationary period.

“We’re talking a lot about the 2 percent who aren’t in compliance, but a huge swath of our workforce came into compliance, and not only did that, but did it willingly,” Ewend said. “And I think their voice sometimes is lost because we are thinking about the folks who have struggled with this.”

Today's Reddit

Dad jokes

COVID-19 Update

It's about ready to pop. I'll be scheduling my booster as soon as they allow it.

WaPo:

FDA panel recommends a booster shot of Johnson & Johnson vaccine for people 18 and older

A panel of outside experts on Friday advised the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a booster dose of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine for people 18 and older, with a recommendation it be given at least two months after the first shot.

The unanimous recommendation on the Johnson & Johnson booster will be taken up by the FDA, which is expected to make a decision within days. The move will chart a path forward for the 14 million people in the United States who have received the vaccine, many of whom have felt left behind as widely used shots employing a different technology garner greater attention from researchers and the public.

The committee’s decision marked another turning point in the story of coronavirus shots, arriving 10 months after regulators authorized the first vaccine, a development that helped alter the course of the pandemic, which has claimed more than 722,000 lives in the United States.

But even as the committee sent one signal on a booster shot for Johnson & Johnson recipients, it heard about data from a small National Institutes of Health study that could muddy that recommendation.

The NIH study evaluated what happened when people got a booster dose different from the vaccine they originally received. That research found that people who initially received a Johnson & Johnson shot would experience a bigger boost in disease-fighting antibody levels in the short term if they received a booster shot of the messenger RNA Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. But limitations in the way the study was designed and in the follow-up made it difficult to draw conclusions.

“We’re in a situation where we’ve just approved a booster for J&J, and we have data that suggests that the mRNA vaccine boost, at least according to antibody responses … looks better,” said Steven Pergam, an associate professor in the vaccine and infectious-disease division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “I think this is a challenge for people out in public to sort this out and to make decisions about what they’re going to do.”

Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, was noncommittal but said it was possible the agency might issue an emergency use authorization at some later date to allow boosters from different companies.

That approach could simplify the logistics of providing boosters.

But University of Maryland School of Medicine professor Kirsten E. Lyke, who presented the data, cautioned against using the findings to select one combination instead of another because of limitations to the research.

“We’ve designed this trial to inform public health decisions, but it’s not powered or designed to compare between groups,” Lyke said.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, unlike the the two-dose messenger RNA shots, was conceived as a one-dose vaccine in hopes it would allow the vaccination of twice as many people and help bring the pandemic under control.

Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, was noncommittal but said it was possible the agency might issue an emergency use authorization at some later date to allow boosters from different companies.

That approach could simplify the logistics of providing boosters.

But University of Maryland School of Medicine professor Kirsten E. Lyke, who presented the data, cautioned against using the findings to select one combination instead of another because of limitations to the research.

“We’ve designed this trial to inform public health decisions, but it’s not powered or designed to compare between groups,” Lyke said.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, unlike the the two-dose messenger RNA shots, was conceived as a one-dose vaccine in hopes it would allow the vaccination of twice as many people and help bring the pandemic under control.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis showed that rates of covid-19 and deaths were significantly lower for people receiving any of the three vaccines available in the United States compared with rates among unvaccinated people. But the analysis found that while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine offered a strong shield of protection, it was somewhat weaker than the other products.

Another recent study found that all three vaccines were protective against hospitalization, but that Johnson & Johnson offered the weakest protection — 71 percent, compared with 93 percent protection from Moderna and 88 percent protective from Pfizer-BioNTech.

“We have shown how the [Johnson & Johnson] covid-19 vaccine could help the U.S. further protect individuals from covid-19, by optimizing immune responses, increasing protection from symptomatic infection, preparing for future variants of concern and potentially helping to reduce transmission,” said Johan Van Hoof, global therapeutic area head of vaccines for Janssen, a division of Johnson & Johnson.

Friday’s recommendation from the advisory committee differs from action the panel took on other boosters, when the committee recommended limiting an extra shot to people at risk because of age or other factors. Johnson & Johnson sought a broader authorization, and several committee members said they had long assumed a second shot would be necessary.

“Prior to, I don’t know, November or December of 2019, the human species was all immunologically naive to this virus. Any single-shot vaccine was likely to induce a primary response and the second shot would be necessary,” said James E.K. Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College. “It was always going to be necessary for J&J recipients to get a second shot.”

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been associated with rare severe adverse events, including a clotting syndrome that can be fatal and is more common in women 18 to 49 years old. It has also been associated with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder.

On Thursday, the same panel advised the FDA to authorize a booster shot of the Moderna vaccine for a select population — people 65 and older and adults 18 and over at high risk of severe illness or complications of covid-19 because of underlying risk factors or exposure at their jobs. Regulators last month authorized a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for similar groups.

During its two-day review, the committee wrestled with the purpose of boosters, because much of the rationale for boosting has been based on the drop in the level of antibodies over time — even though it is clear that other parts of the immune system contribute to protection.

“It’s important to ask, when the concern is for waning immunity, what exactly are we trying to target by trying to increase the flexibility and availability of vaccines for the population?” asked Michael Kurilla, director of the division of clinical innovation at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at NIH. “If we’re trying to drive to zero covid, that’s not going to work. So, I think we need to be a little more careful and deliberate about what impact are we actually trying to create here.”

An advisory committee to the CDC is scheduled to meet Wednesday and Thursday to make recommendations on how booster doses should be used.

Overheard

Republicans have filed

for moral bankruptcy

Vote Blue to stop the squeal

The Dream Scenario

If Trump and Pence are called to testify 

before the Jan 6 Committee,

it'd be sweet beyond comprehension

if their lawyers were Lin Wood and Sydney Powell.

Coin-Operated & Corporate-Owned

Joe Manchin has a real problem.

Common Dreams: (very "leftie", but good record on accuracy and sourcing)

Manchin Has Received $1.5 Million From Corporate Interests Attacking Biden Agenda

Report Large corporations "have given Senator Manchin over a million reasons to avoid paying their fair share," said Accountable.US president Kyle Herrig.

Sen. Joe Manchin, one of a handful of Democratic lawmakers threatening to tank President Joe Biden's legislative agenda, has received at least $1.5 million in campaign donations from the businesses and trade groups leading corporate America's lobbying blitz against the Build Back Better reconciliation package, a new analysis by Accountable.US reveals.

The watchdog group's report, provided exclusively to Common Dreams, shows that corporate powerhouses including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the highest-spending lobbying firm in the U.S—and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America have donated a combined $1,525,700 to Manchin (D-W.Va.), a key swing vote who is currently working to lop as much as $2 trillion off his own party's popular legislation.

"Senator Manchin knows big corporations managed to make billion-dollar profits despite the pandemic as everyday families fell further behind," Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, told Common Dreams. "Manchin now has a golden opportunity to level the playing field for working people by backing investments and tax relief aimed at them for a change—investments that will lower health and childcare costs for most in West Virginia."

"Rich corporations may have given Senator Manchin over a million reasons to avoid paying their fair share—but is it all worth it if he has nothing to show for the families he actually represents?" Herrig asked.

The Chamber of Commerce—whose members include such corporate behemoths as ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and Facebook—has promised to do "everything in [its] power to ensure" the reconciliation bill fails. Earlier this year, the lobbying group said it would financially reward Manchin after he voiced opposition to some of Biden's domestic policy initiatives.

According to Accountable.US, the Chamber's political action committee has given Manchin $10,000 since 2011. Big corporations on the business organization's leadership boards—including Shell Oil, Microsoft, and Honeywell—have donated a total of $565,700 to Manchin through their political arms, the watchdog group found.

Accountable's report also spotlights campaign cash the West Virginia Democrat has received from the Business Roundtable—"whose board is stocked with CEOs from 12 corporations that have given $245,500 to Sen. Manchin"—and the National Association of Manufacturers, "which gave $7,500 to Manchin as its leading corporate members gave him $487,000."

While Manchin has publicly been cagey about what specific programs he wants to cut from the emerging reconciliation package, recent news reports have indicated that the senator—a major ally of the fossil fuel and a coal profiteer—opposes some of Democrats' green-energy proposals, Medicare expansion, and other elements of the sprawling reconciliation plan, despite their popularity in West Virginia and across the nation.

Last week, Axios reported that Manchin has been "telling colleagues that progressives need to pick just one of President Biden's three signature policies for helping working families"—the expanded child tax credit, paid family leave, or child care subsidies—"and discard the other two," an approach that progressives quickly rejected as a non-starter.

"Responsible governing isn't about pitting women, children, and families against each other," said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). "We have the resources to uplift everyone and leave no one behind. It's absurd to say that we don't."

And we (ie: people who want the Dems to get with the fuckin' program) have a problem too.

We can and should pressure Manchin and Sinema to support the big things progressives are trying to do, while also understanding that all they have to do to thwart our efforts is hint that if we get too pushy, they just might have to cross the aisle and join with the other gang - at least for a while.

And of course, that's kinda what's happening now anyway, so we're back to reading tea leaves and trying to sleuth out the sausage-making process at any given moment.

It's annoying and frustrating and I'm real sick of feeling like we're constantly at the edge of the abyss, balanced on the knife's edge, waiting for an announcement that the apocalypse is here now and we're all gonna fucking die because the shit's gonna hit the fan no matter which way we decide to go.

We should be doing a lot better than this. After 15,000 years of bloodshed and conquest and superstitious paranoia, we should be living our lives in a civilized world of genial accommodation among people of good faith and common reason.

Who do I have to kill to get that?

This Thing Called Science

Smallpox killed an estimated 300,000,000 people just in the 20th century. A number almost the equivalent of the current total population of USAmerica, Inc.

300,000,000 dead - in just under 80 years.

Did you catch the part about the economics of it?

We put enormous amounts of time, energy and tax money into the effort to eradicate smallpox over a span of decades. And that cost is recouped here in USAmerica Inc every 6 days.

Every.

Six.

Days.

The extremely positive economic benefits of good public health policy should be obvious, and we should be shouting it to the heavens.

And good public health policy comes from good government.

Not more government - not necessarily bigger or smaller - but better.

I want a government that does good work for me at a reasonable price.