"WW C"- COVID-19, GLOBAL CASES SURPASS 676 MILLION...CASES 676,609,955 DEATHS 6,881,955 US CASES 103,804,263 US DEATHS 1,123,836 8:30pm 1/28/24

lionelzeus

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Woman Dies 13 Days after Getting Covid19 Vaccination

The Department of Health (DOH) reported yesterday that there is so far no evidence that the death of a midwife from COVID-19 was due to her inoculation against the virus.

“We are aware of the unfortunate situation… As of present, there is no reason to believe that this incident was caused by the vaccine,” said DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire.

She reminded the public that vaccines for COVID-19 cannot cause COVID-19 infection.

Reports showed that Elvira Estera of San Mateo, Isabela died of COVID-19, 13 days after she got inoculated against the illness.

Estera, the municipal midwife at the rural health unit in San Mateo, reportedly tested positive for the virus after she received her first dose.

Vergeire noted the regional and the national “adverse event following immunization” (AEFI) is currently conducting a “comprehensive causality assessment” of all adverse events that resulted from vaccination.

“Evidence shows that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination continue to outweigh the risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19,” she added.

The DOH has reiterated its advice to those included in the priority list to get their vaccines.

“We recognize that many people are eager to be vaccinated and protect themselves and their loved ones against COVID-19. It is important to honor the priority groups in the rollout of vaccines throughout the country,” the DOH said.

“Vaccination sites are reminded to conduct thorough symptom and exposure screening,” it added.

“Potential vaccinees are also called on to be fully transparent when being assessed for history of exposure to COVID-19 – this is for your protection,” the DOH added.

The DOH has underscored that even after a person gets his first dose, it would take about three weeks before he or she gets partial protection.

It maintained that even after completing the vaccination, a person may still be contagious to others.


Another Covid19 Vaccination Coincidental Death
:( Are you trolling or really mentally challenged?
13 days after getting a vaccine there's literally zero chance she died from vaccination this is the dumbest shit I have seen posted in this thread.
There's a number of things she could have caused her death over a 13 day period including natural causes smh.
 
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lightbright

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BGOL Investor
midwife-e2-80-99s-death/ar-BB1f1VSf[/URL]

Another Covid19 Vaccination Coincidental Death
You post nothing but but posts to fearmonger vaccines...... you first started with making every thread you could find.... I took notice because you never posted in this sticky..... your cracker threads gained no traction with little to no attention.... so now you post them here.... never anything good..... while I .... and many others posted stories from all angles.... the good and the bad.... you sully this thread EVERY time you post in it.... cracker...... you will forever be known as.......

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Few Facts, Millions Of Clicks: Fearmongering Vaccine Stories Go Viral Online

vaccine-syringe_wide-0408d0124e7d47f04c1a3671bd4ac1349516ebbc-s1200-c85.jpg
A doctor fills syringes with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine this week at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse in San Gabriel, Calif.

The odds of dying after getting a COVID-19 vaccine are virtually nonexistent.

According to recent data from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, you're three times more likely to get struck by lightning.

But you might not know that from looking at your social media feed.

A new NPR analysis finds that articles connecting vaccines and death have been among the most highly engaged with content online this year, going viral in a way that could hinder people's ability to judge the true risk in getting a shot.

The findings also illustrate a broader trend in online misinformation: With social media platforms making more of an effort to take down patently false health claims, bad actors are turning to cherry-picked truths to drive misleading narratives.

Experts say these storylines are much harder for companies to moderate, though they can have the same net effect of creating a distorted and false view of the world.

"It's a really insidious problem," said Deen Freelon, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The social media companies have taken a hard line against disinformation; they have not taken a similarly hard line against fallacies."

To date, the CDC's reporting system has not received evidence linking any deaths directly to vaccines.

And yet, on almost half of all the days so far in 2021, a story about someone dying after receiving a vaccine shot has been among the most popular vaccine-related articles on social media, according to data from the media intelligence company NewsWhip.



CONTINUED:
Misleading Facts Fuel COVID-19 Misinformation, Evade Social Media Moderation : NPR



.
 

BrownTurd

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MICHIGANS TOP HEALTH OFFICIAL: STATE IN THIRD COVID SURGE
The timing will be very close with a potential surge. We have 140 million people with at least one dose of the vaccine and another 30 million who have recovered and have antibody protection. The race to 200 million should be met by Mid April if we continue a pace of 4 million vaccinations a day. 200 million is when you will see a another sharp decline in cases, dropping to about 15,000 a day.

The problem is the surge may not be reflected in the number of cases, because the vaccine will keep almost everyone asymptomatic. Crackas will naturally relax and say “we only have 8 cases a day and 4 deaths”

But that is enough to allow a variant to take over as the primary Covid virus and start effecting vaccinated and recovered individuals.

All Americans simply need to do is wait until June to move about and this would be over
 

BrownTurd

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You post nothing but but posts to fearmonger vaccines...... you first started with making every thread you could find.... I took notice because you never posted in this sticky..... your cracker threads gained no traction with little to no attention.... so now you post them here.... never anything good..... while I .... and many others posted stories from all angles.... the good and the bad.... you sully this thread EVERY time you post in it.... cracker...... you will forever be known as.......

coollogo-com-2778171.png


Few Facts, Millions Of Clicks: Fearmongering Vaccine Stories Go Viral Online

vaccine-syringe_wide-0408d0124e7d47f04c1a3671bd4ac1349516ebbc-s1200-c85.jpg
A doctor fills syringes with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine this week at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse in San Gabriel, Calif.

The odds of dying after getting a COVID-19 vaccine are virtually nonexistent.

According to recent data from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, you're three times more likely to get struck by lightning.

But you might not know that from looking at your social media feed.

A new NPR analysis finds that articles connecting vaccines and death have been among the most highly engaged with content online this year, going viral in a way that could hinder people's ability to judge the true risk in getting a shot.

The findings also illustrate a broader trend in online misinformation: With social media platforms making more of an effort to take down patently false health claims, bad actors are turning to cherry-picked truths to drive misleading narratives.

Experts say these storylines are much harder for companies to moderate, though they can have the same net effect of creating a distorted and false view of the world.

"It's a really insidious problem," said Deen Freelon, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The social media companies have taken a hard line against disinformation; they have not taken a similarly hard line against fallacies."

To date, the CDC's reporting system has not received evidence linking any deaths directly to vaccines.

And yet, on almost half of all the days so far in 2021, a story about someone dying after receiving a vaccine shot has been among the most popular vaccine-related articles on social media, according to data from the media intelligence company NewsWhip.



CONTINUED:
Misleading Facts Fuel COVID-19 Misinformation, Evade Social Media Moderation : NPR



.
Dude post shit from white supremacy sites if you follow his links
 

LordSinister

One Punch Mayne
Super Moderator
I traveled down south to work, the entire night shift on my system got covid. Rig is shutting down and I'm going home.

All because these cac's are cutting corners, not doing quarantines and not enforcing masks, distancing etc.

The hotel I'm at doesn't enforce shit, you can leave when you want, no room service and it's full of kids smoking weed and having parties.

Cheap bastards don't gaf about your health. :smh:
 

Helico-pterFunk

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BGOL Legend
I traveled down south to work, the entire night shift on my system got covid. Rig is shutting down and I'm going home.

All because these cac's are cutting corners, not doing quarantines and not enforcing masks, distancing etc.

The hotel I'm at doesn't enforce shit, you can leave when you want, no room service and it's full of kids smoking weed and having parties.

Cheap bastards don't gaf about your health. :smh:




Damn man - stay safe, LS.

Sorry to hear about this.
 

Helico-pterFunk

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BGOL Legend

 

playahaitian

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In the U.S., cases tick upward again as variants spread and states lift restrictions.
March 28, 2021, 11:15 a.m. ETMarch 28, 2021
March 28, 2021
By Apoorva Mandavilli




People waiting for coronavirus tests in Corona, Queens, N.Y., last week. The state’s seven-day average of new infections has shot up by more than 3,000 since last Tuesday.Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

After weeks of decline followed by a steady plateau, coronavirus cases are rising again in the United States. Deaths are still decreasing, but the country averaged 61,545 cases last week, 11 percent more than the average two weeks earlier.

Scientists predicted weeks ago that the number of infections would curve upward again in late March, at least in part because of the rise of variants of the coronavirus across the country. The variant that walloped Britain, called B.1.1.7, has led to a new wave of cases across most of Europe. Some scientists warned that it may lead to a new wave in the United States.

The rise in infections is also a result of state leaders pulling back on mitigation measures, and large social interactions, like spring break gatherings in Florida, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s chief science adviser, said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday.



“The variants are playing a part, but it’s not completely the variants,” Dr. Fauci said. Most states have lifted restrictions, including on indoor dining, in response to the drop in numbers, actions that Dr. Fauci called “premature.”



As of Thursday, there were 8,337 known cases of the B.1.1.7 variant in the country, but the actual number is probably much higher because labs in the country analyze only a very small proportion of the diagnosed cases. Still, the trend is clear: The variant — which is more transmissible and possibly more lethal — has been rising exponentially in the United States, its growth masked by the overall drop in infections.

“It is remarkable how much this recalls the situation last year where we had introductions of virus to different places that scientists warned would be a problem,” Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health, said in an interview on Sunday. “People waited for them to be a problem before they took action — and then too late, they took action.”

Dr. Hanage said he was particularly worried about B.1.1.7 because it is at least 50 percent more transmissible than the original virus. The brisk pace of vaccinations will stem the tide somewhat, but the rising immunity in the population may be more than offset by the variant’s contagiousness, he added. “B.1.1.7 is really scary,” he said.

The vaccines in use in the United States — made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — are expected to prevent severe disease and death from any of the variants, although they are slightly less effective against a variant that was identified in South Africa. That variant, known as B.1.351, has not yet spread widely in the United States.


Because many of the highest-risk people have been inoculated, hospitalizations and deaths may not show a steep rise along with infections. But a surge in cases will still lead to some severe cases and deaths, Dr. Hanage said.

“How large it will be we’ll need to wait and see,” he said. “But ideally we would not be waiting to see, ideally we’d be taking action.”
 

playahaitian

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Trump’s former pandemic coordinator suggests a restrained response may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
March 28, 2021, 11:59 p.m. ETMarch 28, 2021
March 28, 2021
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg



Former President Donald J. Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence with Adm. Brett P. Giroir and Dr. Deborah Birx during a news conference at the White House in April 2020.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

In interviews broadcast on CNN Sunday night, former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic officials confirmed in stark and no uncertain terms what was already an open secret in Washington: The administration’s pandemic response was riddled with dysfunction, and the discord, untruths and infighting most likely cost many lives.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, Mr. Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, suggested that hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died needlessly, and Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the testing czar, said the administration had lied to the public about the availability of testing.
The comments were among a string of bombshells that emerged during a CNN special report that featured the doctors who led the government’s coronavirus response in 2020.

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Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accused Mr. Trump’s health secretary, Alex M. Azar III, and the secretary’s leadership team of pressuring him to revise scientific reports. “Now he may deny that, but it’s true,” Dr. Redfield said in an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. Mr. Azar, in a statement, denied it.



Dr. Stephen K. Hahn, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said his relationship with Mr. Azar had grown “strained” after the health secretary revoked the agency’s power to regulate coronavirus tests. “That was a line in the sand for me,” Dr. Hahn said. When Dr. Gupta asked him if Mr. Azar had screamed at him, Dr. Hahn replied: “You should ask him that question.”


But it was Dr. Birx, who has been pilloried for praising Mr. Trump as being “so attentive to the scientific literature” and for not publicly correcting the president as he made outlandish claims about unproven therapies, whose disclosures may have been the most compelling.


As of Sunday, more than 548,000 Americans have died from infection with the coronavirus. “I look at it this way,” she said. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge.”

“All of the rest of them,” she said, referring to almost 450,000 deaths, “in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” had the administration acted more aggressively.

In what was in one of her first televised interviews since leaving the White House in January, she also described a “very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult” phone call with Mr. Trump after she spoke out about the dangers of the virus last summer. “Everybody in the White House was upset with that interview,” she said.



After that, she decided to travel the country to talk to state and local leaders about masks and social distancing and other public health measures that the president didn’t want her to explain to the American public from the White House podium.

Dr. Gupta asked if she was being censored. “Clearly someone was blocking me from doing it,” she said. “My understanding was I could not be national because the president might see it.”

Several of the officials, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci — who unlike the others is a career scientist and is now advising President Biden — blamed China, where the virus was first detected, for not being open enough with the United States. And several, including Dr. Redfield and Admiral Giroir, said early stumbles with testing — and the attitude within the White House that testing made the president look bad by driving up the number of case reports — were a serious problem in the administration’s response.

And the problems with testing went beyond simply Mr. Trump’s obsession with optics. Admiral Giroir said that the administration simply did not have as many tests as top officials claimed at the time.

“When we said there were millions of tests — there weren’t, right?” he said. “There were components of the test available but not the full deal.”

 

playahaitian

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‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way, but developing them won’t be easy
White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives



Proof of vaccination to travel or attend school is not new, but the coronavirus has introduced a potential need to modernize outdated paper standards. (Jonathan Baran/The Washington Post)
By
Dan Diamond,
Lena H. Sun and
Isaac Stanley-Becker
March 28, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. EDT
The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.

The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again.
The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days, said one official.
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The White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative, instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials made this month.

“Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients said at a March 12 briefing.
The initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration, with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a variety of experts, including military officials helping administer vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.

Credentials showing that people have been vaccinated could be crucial for the resumption of international travel. (Rick Bowmer/AP)
The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass. Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said.
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Other countries are racing ahead with their own passport plans, with the European Union pledging to release digital certificates that would allow for summer travel.

U.S. officials say they are grappling with an array of challenges, including data privacy and health-care equity. They want to make sure all Americans will be able to get credentials that prove they have been vaccinated, but also want to set up systems that are not easily hacked or passports that cannot be counterfeited, given that forgeries are already starting to appear.

One of the most significant hurdles facing federal officials: the sheer number of passport initiatives underway, with the Biden administration this month identifying at least 17, according to slides obtained by The Washington Post.

Those initiatives — such as a World Health Organization-led global effort and a digital pass devised by IBM that is being tested in New York state — are rapidly moving forward, even as the White House deliberates about how best to track the shots and avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated.

One of the teams working on vaccine passports is the Vaccination Credential Initiative, a coalition endeavoring to standardize how data in vaccination records is tracked.

Proof of vaccination could bring peace of mind to restaurant workers and customers, experts say. (Bryan Anselm for The Washington Post)
“The busboy, the janitor, the waiter that works at a restaurant, wants to be surrounded by employees that are going back to work safely — and wants to have the patrons ideally be safe as well,” said Brian Anderson, a physician at Mitre, a nonprofit company that runs federally funded research centers, who is helping lead the initiative. “Creating an environment for those vulnerable populations to get back to work safely — and to know that the people coming back to their business are ‘safe,’ and vaccinated — would be a great scenario.”
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Anderson’s team is aiming to release its free software standards in April, hoping developers will use them to help build digital vaccine records that allow people to show they have been inoculated. The Vaccination Credential Initiative includes the Mayo Clinic, Microsoft and more than 225 other organizations, many of which have pledged to use the code when administering shots.

Biden administration officials privately acknowledge the high stakes of the effort.

Proof of vaccination “may be a critical driver for restoring baseline population health and promoting safe return to social, commercial, and leisure activities,” according to the March 2 slides prepared by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and obtained by The Post. But officials at the session — attended by more than 150 staff from the health, defense, homeland security and other departments, and even far-flung agencies such as NASA — warned of the “confusing array” of efforts underway to create credentials.
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“A chaotic and ineffective vaccine credential approach could hamper our pandemic response by undercutting health safety measures, slowing economic recovery, and undermining public trust and confidence,” one slide reads.

Micky Tripathi, whom Biden tapped as the national coordinator for health IT, recently said federal officials are concerned with a variety of health-tech challenges, including protecting the credentials against fraud, ensuring data security and making certain that low-income populations aren’t squeezed out.

“How do we make sure that whatever is available is accessible to everyone so no one is left behind or feeling like they can’t participate in the return of their day-to-day activities?” Tripathi asked at a virtual meeting hosted by the Health IT Leadership Roundtable on March 11.
Tripathi told the group he didn’t like the term “vaccine passports,” adding that “passports are something that are issued by governments. … I think of them as vaccine credentials or certificates.” Tripathi did not respond to a request for comment.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, visited recently by President Biden and Vice President Harris, is participating in a World Health Organization initiative to develop digital vaccination certificates. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is participating in the WHO’s effort to create “digital vaccination certificates,” also is preparing to help advise on the passport rollout. The health agency says it is expecting to play a role in determining which organizations will credential and issue the certificates, in addition to informing the public, according to CDC documents reviewed by The Post.
Fully vaccinated people can visit with nearby grandchildren, dine indoors with one another, CDC says

The Biden administration has promised to release more information about its efforts. Asked by Hawaii Gov. David Ige (D) on Tuesday about the state of the passport initiative, Zients told governors he would provide a more detailed briefing this week, according to two people on the call, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversation.
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Federal officials defended the pace of the project.

Taking time to get the credentialing project right “is very, very important because this has a high likelihood of being either built wrong, used wrong or a bureaucratic mess,” said one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The official said some of the considerations include how to adjust for the spread of variants, how booster shots would be tracked and even questions about how long immunity lasts after getting a shot. There’s “a lot to think through,” the official said.

“Many people see this as a key aspect to getting things closer to normal,” said Kristen McGovern, a partner at health-care consultancy Sirona Strategies and former chief of staff at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. But the technical challenges are significant and given that so many separate efforts are underway, “it would be an almost herculean task to come up with a single standard” for all the vaccine credentials to follow, McGovern said.

There is evidence vaccine passports could motivate skeptical Americans to get shots. Several vaccine-hesitant participants at a recent focus group of Trump voters led by pollster Frank Luntz suggested their desire to see family, go on vacation and resume other aspects of daily life outpaced fear of the shots, particularly if travel companies and others moved to require proof of vaccination.

Cruise companies are among the firms saying they will require proof of vaccination before reopening. (Christina Mendenhall/Bloomberg News)
“We love to travel. We love to take cruises. I would get it to travel,” said Debbie of Georgia, who like others in the focus group was identified only by her first name.



Some attendees dissented and warned that requiring a credential would backfire.
“I would change my travel plans,” said a man identified as Patrick of Tennessee.

Trump voters are asked: Would you get a coronavirus vaccine if travel mandated it?

A focus group of vaccine-hesitant Trump voters spoke about their impressions of vaccine passports after listening to politicians and pollsters. (Courtesy of Frank Luntz and de Beaumont Foundation)

Public health and ethics experts agreed that the Biden administration needed to strike a careful balance: Encourage shots and support the private-sector initiatives but don’t put too much federal emphasis on the looming passports.

“If it became a government mandate, it would go down a dark road very quickly,” said Brian C. Castrucci, who leads the Bethesda, Md.-based de Beaumont Foundation, a public health group funding Luntz’s research into why some Americans are balking at the vaccine. “It becomes a credential. It becomes a ‘needing your papers,’ if you will. That could be dangerous — and it could turn off people.”

“It has to be that everyone can get it, and it’s their choice, as it were,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethics expert who co-authored a Journal of the American Medical Association article last year about the ethics of such certificates and advised Biden’s transition team on the coronavirus. “The one thing I am concerned is that some people won’t be able to get vaccinated for a variety of reasons.”
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Emanuel added that the passports will be an element of global travel — not just domestic policy. Key aviation and travel associations on March 22 called on the White House to finalize its vaccine credential plan by May, saying it was essential for the safe resumption of international travel.
Donald Rucker, who led the health IT office during the Trump administration, said myriad technical issues await the rollout of vaccine credentials, including how they are tracked, whether they are enforced and who pulls together the initial records of which Americans have gotten shots.
Rucker said keeping vaccine credentials could help officials better understand coronavirus vaccination, including possible long-term side effects, if the data is connected with the health information exchanges that states maintain.

“The tracking of vaccinations is not just simply for vaccine passports,” Rucker said. “The tracking of vaccinations is a broader issue of ‘we’re giving a novel biologic agent to the entire country,’ more or less.”

 

playahaitian

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Getting to Yes: A Nursing Home’s Mission to Vaccinate Its Hesitant Staff
Almost all of the residents at Forest Hills of D.C. got their initial Covid-19 shots in January. But nearly half of the staff there had declined. Would an effort to change their minds succeed?



  • 52


Deborah Childs, a staff member of the Forest Hills nursing home in Washington, D.C., receiving a Covid-19 vaccine last month. She was hesitant at first, she said, but later, “I took the opportunity to just read everything I could.”
By Abby Goodnough
Photographs by Kenny Holston
Published March 28, 2021Updated March 29, 2021, 12:09 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The Covid-19 vaccine had finally come to Forest Hills of D.C., a nursing home in a prosperous neighborhood of the nation’s capital, but there was a problem. Though nearly all of the home’s residents agreed to get the shots, nearly half its 200 staff members declined.
Tina Sandri, the chief executive, vowed not to let those numbers stand.
Over the next two months, rounding out the most bruising year of her long career in elder care, Ms. Sandri tried everything. She bombarded employees with text messages containing facts about the science behind the vaccines. She assigned a popular young worker to try to sway reluctant colleagues as an “influencer.” She set up a giant screen to show a television special that the Black actor and director Tyler Perry made to fight vaccine hesitancy — on a continuous loop, no less. Most of all, she worked to understand their concerns.
“You really have to listen to each person’s story and address it from that standpoint, so they feel, ‘This is a workplace that cares about me,’” she said.
Three months after the nation’s health care workers were among the first Americans to be eligible for the lifesaving new vaccines, long-term care facilities across the country continue to face a similar daunting challenge. The federal program that sent vaccinators from Walgreens and CVS into tens of thousands of nursing homes and assisted living residences has by one measure been strikingly successful, inoculating nearly all of the vulnerable residents of the facilities. Deaths in nursing homes have plummeted since the program began in late December.
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But reaching the mostly low-wage employees of the facilities has proved far more difficult. A poll by The Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation conducted from Feb. 11 to March 7 found that half of the workers at nursing homes had yet to get even a first shot, and only 15 percent of that group said they definitely planned to.

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At Forest Hills, the workers who turned down the vaccine during the center’s first vaccination event in early January included nurses, certified nursing assistants, members of the kitchen and activities staffs, and a security officer. Most were Black, reflecting the overall makeup of the home’s work force; many were immigrants from African countries, such as Nigeria, Liberia and Cameroon.
Ms. Sandri’s goal was to persuade — not pressure — them. But she found there was not one unifying story behind their refusal, and no straightforward message that helped to convince them.
She ruled out some tactics deployed by other nursing homes, including offering gift cards, bonuses or extra vacation days to employees who agreed to get the vaccine; Ms. Sandri considered those incentives inappropriate and called them “bribes.”
“We’re doing this because we care,” she said. “To dilute that message with other things is almost patronizing to people’s intellect.”
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The vaccinators from Walgreens would come back twice more — in early February and early March — and Ms. Sandri had dozens of minds to change. By her count, there were still 92 employees who needed the shot.


Image
Tina Sandri, right, chief executive of Forest Hills of D.C., receiving her vaccine shot. She wanted the first day of vaccinations to feel like a party, she said.


Image
Mariah Proctor, a security guard at Forest Hills, said her mother had said to her about the vaccine: “You don’t know the ingredients. You know nothing.”
January
Ms. Sandri, 57, a yoga and outdoors enthusiast whose manner is at once bustling and soothing, had arrived at Forest Hills only in May, replacing a predecessor who left after the coronavirus had taken hold.
Three residents at Forest Hills had died from the virus and 17 others had become ill, along with 45 members of the staff — a less devastating toll than at many other nursing homes, but still an ordeal. Another resident would die in February, after a flurry of cases over the holiday period.

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For the first vaccination event, on Jan. 4, Ms. Sandri laid out snacks, took lots of pictures and played upbeat music — “the cookout kind!” — aiming to create a partylike atmosphere that could help people feel the hope and promise of getting immunized.
When Mariah Proctor, a security guard, arrived for her shift that day, she encountered the festive buzz — and the persistent question between colleagues: “Are you getting it?”
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Her answer was no. A conversation with her mother, who she said had never taken her for vaccinations for fear of putting anything besides healthy food in her children’s bodies, had cemented her decision.
Ms. Proctor, 24, said her mother had told her: “You don’t even know what that is. You don’t know the ingredients. You know nothing.”
After the disappointing vaccination turnout that first day, and with morale dipping and emotions fragile as the pandemic wore on, Ms. Sandri changed her approach. She had been holding “huddles” with different departments to explain the science of the vaccines, but now, instead of continuing to load people with facts, she focused on asking them: What information do you need? What is your concern?


Image
Miles Lee has been serving as an influencer of sorts at Forest Hills, talking to his co-workers about their feelings or offering to look up information for them about the vaccine.


Image
Ms. Sandri reviewing the “Heroes of Hope” wall depicting staff members who have been vaccinated.
February
Ms. Proctor was taking a break from her shift with Deborah Childs, a colleague from the payroll department who had also refused the vaccine, when the vaccinators from Walgreens came back on a snowy day in early February.
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This time, Ms. Childs agreed to get the vaccine.
“I looked up the company and, you know, I found out that they’ve been doing research on mRNA for over 10 years, so that made me feel a little bit better,” she said, referring to the molecule that is the active ingredient in the Moderna vaccine that Walgreens is offering.
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She was still a little scared, especially after reading about a doctor in Miami who had developed a rare blood disorder days after getting the Pfizer shot and died two weeks later. Still, she said: “I’m ready to get back to my life. And I know that this is probably one of the ways that we’re going to get back to being normal.”
Ms. Proctor was wavering. “My emotions are everywhere,” she said. She had been watching co-workers who had received their shots and asking them how they felt. “I would say that I am educating myself a little more now, versus just saying, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said.
Yet, she ended up refusing the shot again that day.
She wasn’t afraid of needles — she had multiple tattoos, she said, laughing. So what was holding her back?
“Having a bad reaction, or not being able to adjust to it at all,” she said.
She had also heard some frightening things — even though she suspected they weren’t true. “I heard someone say the first couple of people who took it for the trial died,” she said. “I’m not going to believe those things, but you do keep them in the back of your head and it makes you scared.”
Still, Ms. Sandri’s efforts seemed to be paying off. Forty-eight more workers decided to get their first shot that day.
For those who remained unvaccinated, Ms. Sandri had four weeks to change their minds.
March


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Janice Johnson, director of nursing and infection prevention at Forest Hills, checking on staff members on vaccination day.


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Staff members waiting their turn for the shot.
Across the country, vaccine hesitancy was receding — a Pew poll conducted in late February found that 30 percent of Americans said they would probably or definitely not get vaccinated, down from the 39 percent who said the same in November. The poll also found that far more Black Americans were willing to get the vaccine than they were before, but Ms. Sandri did not find that to be true among the African immigrants on her staff.
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For them, the half-hour Tyler Perry video that had been playing on repeat on a giant screen in the multipurpose room did not seem to resonate.
Ms. Sandri, who is of Chinese descent, began to understand. “I’m Asian, but I’m not Japanese or Thai or Indian, and they are very different people,” she said. “Until we understand cultural sensitivities beyond the major skin color groups, we’re not going to be successful at reaching herd immunity levels with some of those subsets.”
She started planning to have her director of maintenance, an African immigrant who has been vaccinated, to talk to reluctant peers about his experience and their concerns, and to find leaders of local African churches who might be willing to do the same.
She also doubled down on what she believed was working best: listening to and addressing the concerns of her employees one by one — what she called a “time-intensive, conversation-intensive, case-by-case uphill climb.”
The key, she said, was to tailor her message to what would resonate most with each person.
“For analytical people, we provided data on number of cases, number of people in trials, percent of people who experience an immune response,” she said. “For relationship-based thinkers, we asked if they had any vulnerable friends or family members, and how having or not having the vaccine might impact the relationship.”
Still, as the date of the third vaccination event approached in early March, Ms. Proctor was tired — of the pandemic and the long loss of freedoms, but also of hearing every day at work about the importance of getting the shot. Ms. Sandri, whose office was just around the corner, stopped by frequently to chat and gently raise the benefits of being vaccinated.
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“It feels a little — almost like peer pressure,” Ms. Proctor said.
At times, she envied people who worked outside health care, suspecting they were not being barraged with information about the vaccine in quite the same way. Yet, she had come to appreciate that the vaccine was a commodity that most people her age — and most people in general — did not have access to yet. Getting vaccinated, she told herself, could help protect her sister who lived with her. It would also protect her when she returned to her second job — bartending — and made long-delayed trips to Puerto Rico and Jamaica later in the year.
By March 8, the day of the final event at Forest Hills, she was close to talking herself into rolling up her sleeve. At Ms. Sandri’s urging, she had watched the Tyler Perry special and an online town-hall-style forum for workers at nursing homes about the vaccine, organized by the Black Coalition Against Covid-19.
“It gave me a little more confidence,” she said. “I don’t know anyone in my immediate circle that took the vaccine yet, and it just makes me feel like if no one else has done it, then maybe I should.”


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Despite working to convince herself of the vaccine’s benefits over recent days, Ms. Procter grew concerned as she was about to get vaccinated. Ms. Sandri was there to reassure Ms. Proctor before her shot.


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Ms. Childs, who was at first hesitant about getting the vaccine, received her second dose this month. “I’m ready to get back to my life,” she said. “And I know that this is probably one of the ways that we’re going to get back to being normal.”
The final tally
Fifteen minutes before her shift ended, Ms. Proctor made her way to the home’s all-purpose room — normally the sight of bingo games and movie nights — and took off her jacket. Scanning the consent form with its daunting questions — Have you ever had a severe allergic reaction to something? Do you have a bleeding disorder or weakened immune system? — made her feel “leery,” she said.
Still, she got the shot. As she lingered in an easy chair afterward, Ms. Sandri fluttered in to check on her, gently touching her bare arm.
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“I don’t have any thoughts, really, besides wondering how I’m going to feel — that’s my main concern,” Ms. Proctor said. By the end of the day, 18 more co-workers, along with Ms. Proctor, had joined the ranks of the partly or fully vaccinated. They now make up 79 percent of the staff at Forest Hills.
“I’m ready to do cartwheels down the hallway,” Ms. Sandri said, noting that Forest Hills had surpassed the goal set by the American Health Care Association, a trade group, to vaccinate 75 percent of the nation’s nursing home work force by the end of June.
With the federal program ending soon, the city’s health department had agreed to provide doses for anyone in nursing homes who still needed them.
“Everyone’s fears are real, whether or not they are grounded in science or in something they believe right now,” Ms. Sandri said, recounting what she had learned from her staff over the past few months. “Beliefs change with time or new knowledge, so we have to ride it out. Listen hard, don’t judge and let them move at their own pace.”

 

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We Can’t End the Pandemic Without Vaccinating Kids
So far, children have mostly been spared from the worst aspects of Covid-19. Let’s keep it that way.

By Jeremy Samuel Faust and Angela L. Rasmussen
Dr. Faust is a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Rasmussen is a virologist at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center.
March 29, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET


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Credit...Marta Monteiro
The United States’ coronavirus vaccine rollout has finally hit its stride, with well over two million doses administered daily. Soon, vaccines will be available to all adults who want them.
Children are the next vaccination frontier. When it comes time to vaccinate them, the same urgency and large-scale coordination efforts driving adult vaccination must continue if we want to sustainably drive down Covid-19 cases and ultimately end the pandemic.
Currently, vaccine demand among adults exceeds the supply. But there’s reason to worry that once children are eligible, vaccination rates for them will initially be far lower and rise more slowly than those seen among adults. Children are much less likely than adults to be hospitalized with Covid-19, and deaths from the disease among kids are rare. Parents may wonder, if Covid-19 is relatively harmless for my children, what’s the hurry?
One reason to vaccinate children quickly is that even a small number of critical Covid-19 cases among children is worth vaccinating against. The burden of long-term effects from Covid-19 in children — including rare but serious cases of inflammatory syndrome — remains unclear, especially since many have asymptomatic infections that go undiagnosed.
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But the most important and least recognized reason to vaccinate all children quickly is the possibility that the virus will continue to spread and mutate into more dangerous variants, including ones that could harm both children and adults.

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Variants “of concern” first identified in Britain, South Africa, Brazil and California are being closely followed by epidemiologists. Some of these appear more contagious than earlier versions, and at least one of them — B.1.1.7, first observed in Britain — appears to cause a slight uptick in the risk of dying of Covid-19. So far, the vaccines still appear to work well against them.

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But we might not be so fortunate with future variants. Viruses acquire mutations as they spread. The more infections there are, the more chances the coronavirus has to mutate. This increases the likelihood that a more dangerous strain could emerge. Variants that cause more severe illness in children are likely to emerge from children themselves, especially with adults becoming less hospitable hosts for infection as vaccinations rise.
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Just as important, vaccinating children quickly will improve our odds of emerging from this crisis sooner. The United States is likely to need to vaccinate children to reach herd immunity, as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, and others have noted.
Clinical trials to prove that the vaccines are safe for use in children are underway. But we need to be prepared for the reality that those trials will not generate the kinds of blockbuster results that the studies of adults did.
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We probably won’t know how effective the vaccines are at preventing severe disease in children, for example. That’s because in order to figure out whether a vaccine is effective in kids, the main outcome of the trials needs to be common enough among children to determine whether a vaccine makes any real difference. Fortunately, at the moment, serious disease among children is too rare for any reasonable-size trial to measure.
Instead, the U.S. vaccine trials for children (and those abroad that we are aware of) will primarily focus on safety and whether the vaccines produce an immune response.
From our perspectives as a scientist and a clinician, the trials are designed to ask the right questions: Are these vaccines safe for children? What dose produces a strong enough immune response without a high number of bothersome side effects?
The downside, though, is that the results may do little to make parents feel urgency around vaccinating their children, because many parents already feel that their children are protected. There are early hints that some parents might be hesitant to get their child inoculated. A new study — not yet vetted by peer review — found that parents are more reluctant to take the Covid-19 vaccine compared with non-parents and that these sentiments can mirror their intentions to vaccinate their children.
That’s why a sober risk assessment is in order. The coronavirus may kill as many as one in 10,000 infected children, though some studies imply the rate is lower. That risk is significantly higher than that of serious but treatable side effects that may be seen from vaccines. The risk of severe Covid-19 is also higher for children with underlying medical conditions.
As with any vaccine, we should prepare for the likelihood that anecdotes of children getting sick after vaccination will emerge and that the vaccine will be blamed. We cannot let that deter the vaccination effort. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must continue to track and share reports of health issues after vaccination, as well as the usual background rates for any condition. We should avoid taking troubling stories out of context.
Parents can rest assured that once the vaccine trials for children are complete and the data is reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration, it will be considered safe to begin vaccinating kids. Assuming that happens, we will need to hurry up and vaccinate all children, making sure we reach underserved communities. That includes children abroad, because any harmful coronavirus variants that emerge elsewhere will eventually reach all of us.
So far, children have mostly been spared from the worst aspects of this disease. For that, we are relieved. However, we owe that to a lot of luck. From here on out, we must deliberately protect them.

 

4 Dimensional

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We on the uptick again! Who didn't see this coming? 4th wave is underway and the Northeast is leading the charge (New York and New Jersey, followed by Texas and Florida).

The Covid Tracking Project stopped collecting data on March 7th and I am not just getting around to making adjustments. As of now, I do not have a source for hospitalization and testing data. I used the Covid Tracking Project to initialize most of my python scripts, so I am missing 22 days' worth of data. As of now, 100% of my data is coming from John Hopkins.

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