The Trump Death Cult Extends The Coronavirus Pandemic – Just Get Vaccinated, Damnit!

CNN reports, Five undervaccinated clusters put the entire United States at risk:

A new data analysis identifies clusters of unvaccinated people, most of them in the southern United States, that are vulnerable to surges in Covid-19 cases and could become breeding grounds for even more deadly Covid-19 variants.

The analysis by researchers at Georgetown University identified 30 clusters of counties with low vaccination rates and significant population sizes. The five most significant of those clusters are sprawled across large swaths of the southeastern United States and a smaller portion in the Midwest.

The five clusters are largely in parts of eight states, starting in the east in Georgia and stretching west to Texas and north to southern Missouri. The clusters also include parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee, and are made up of mostly smaller counties but also cities such as Montgomery, Alabama; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Amarillo, Texas.

Most of these states are currently seeing increases in Covid-19 cases.

“Parts of the country are just as vulnerable if not more vulnerable than they were in December, 2020,” said Shweta Bansal, an associate professor of biology at Georgetown University. Bansal heads up the US COVID-19 Vaccination Tracking project, which has been gathering data on the US vaccine rollout since it began in December.

Those vulnerable clusters put all of the United States — and to some extent, the world — at risk for going back to 2020, since high-transmission areas can become breeding grounds for Covid-19 variants that could go on to evade Covid-19 vaccines.

“These clusters of unvaccinated people are what is standing in the way of us putting this virus down permanently,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN medical analyst and professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University.

Millions of unvaccinated people in the clusters

About one-third of Americans have not received even a single Covid-19 shot — and the Georgetown analysis shows that these people are not evenly spread around the United States.

Analyzing county vaccination data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health departments, the Georgetown researchers found 30 clusters of counties throughout the US that have low vaccination rates compared to the national average and also have significant population size.

The five most significant clusters together include more than 15 million people. Of those, only 27.9% are fully vaccinated — far lower than the national rate of 47.6%.

While the clusters do encompass some sizable cities, 92% of the counties in the clusters have a population of less than 100,000.

The federal government has been engaging with churches and organizations such as the YMCA to encourage Covid-19 vaccination in areas like these, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy told CNN.
“These are extraordinary partners in reaching communities [in rural areas] where health care access isn’t as easy as it is in urban areas,” he said.

Clusters give virus opportunities to mutate

The Delta variant, which now comprises more than half the cases in the United States, is the latest in a long string of Covid-19 variants that have spread more easily and in some cases caused more severe illness.

That’s why the clusters are so worrisome. Each time a virus spreads, it has an opportunity to learn how to mutate.

“We know that if you give the virus the opportunity to circulate and replicate, you give it the opportunity to generate more variants,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, told CNN.

The Delta variant has learned how to evade Covid-19 vaccines to a small degree, but they still offer excellent protection against severe disease and hospitalization.

The fear is that the next variant might be able to outsmart the vaccine more thoroughly, causing problems even for parts of the country that have high vaccination rates.

“We’ve been lucky with the variants so far that they’ve been relatively susceptible to our vaccine, but the more you roll the dice, the more opportunities there will be for a resistant variant,” Reiner said.

UPDATE:

The Delta variant, first identified in India, can evade some of the neutralizing antibodies spurred by vaccines or through natural infection, and a single dose of the two-shot vaccines “barely” thwarted the mutation, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature. However, two shots of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech shots still provide powerful protection, researchers found.

The Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine appears less effective against infections from the troublesome Delta variant, but it still remains highly effective against hospitalizations, Politico reports, citing early data from a study conducted in Israel. From June 6 to July 2, the shot prevented 64% of cases, a notable drop from the previous 94% reported through June 5.

Pfizer and vaccine partner BioNTech said they’re preparing a booster shot that will target the emerging Delta variant, first found in India, and added that evidence indicates the immunity from the pair’s mRNA shot could wane following a second dose. On the back of promising data, the duo plan to file an application for a third shot with regulators in the coming weeks. But in a note sent out immediately following their announcement, the FDA and CDC jointly argued that Americans don’t need a booster shot just yet. 

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization believes more data are needed to know whether a COVID-19 booster will be necessary, a spokesperson said. Specifically, studies would need to determine how long protection from the vaccines last and whether a booster would be beneficial at all, and for whom, the global health agency said.

Fox News should lose its broadcast license and go dark because it promotes anti-vaxxer disinformation propaganda and is a public health threat, and is already responsible for the death of some of its viewers. Fox’s ongoing assault on the coronavirus vaccination campaign is going to kill its viewers:

On Thursday morning, a few hours after the world marked the 4 millionth known coronavirus death, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade [literally the stupidest individual I have ever seen on TV] offered a critique of President Joe Biden’s response to the pandemic.

“The focus of this administration on vaccination is mind-boggling,” he complained.

More than 600,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and millions have been infected.

Over the next few minutes, Kilmeade and his co-hosts provided a bevy of rationales for why their viewers might not want to get the shots, from previous infection to concerns about the vaccines’ emergency use authorization to fears about potential health effects, all dressed up in grievances about the manner in which the government is promoting the inoculations.

What the Fox & Friends crew did not offer their viewers was a shred of encouragement to get vaccinated if they aren’t already. That’s how Fox’s biggest stars and other leading lights of the right-wing press have treated the vaccination campaign for months, even as evidence of the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness, including against new variants of the virus, has poured in.

I’ve written throughout the pandemic about Fox’s unique moral responsibility to its viewers, who trust its right-wing propagandists to the exclusion of credible news sources. The network has failed them time after time, from downplaying the threat the virus posed as it first spread to delegitimizing virtually every policy implemented to stem it.

[Fox hosts have] been all but actively sabotaging the effort to protect Americans — including their own viewers — from early, painful deaths. The network’s stars and their guests regularly suggest the vaccines may not work, stoke baseless fears about their safety, use incendiary rhetoric about their deployment, and foment culture war grievances about the vaccination effort.

On Wednesday night, for example, Tucker Carlson gave Turning Point USA grifter extraordinaire Charlie Kirk a platform to launch his organization’s campaign against vaccination requirements on college campuses.

[T]he following hour of Fox’s prime-time lineup also featured a warning against vaccination. Ingraham Angle guest Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist, fearmongered about the vaccines’ “dangerous mechanism of action” in which they “hijack the body’s cellular machinery,” warning that “unless we really have a compelling case, no one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines.” As he spoke, chyrons decried “The Left’s Constant COVID Power Grab” and “Left Intensifies COVID Vaccine Pressure Campaign.”

The situation did not improve on Thursday night.

‘Literally killing his audience’: Viewers shocked after Tucker Carlson links COVID vaccines to eugenics.

This anti-vaxxer disinformation propagandist has been doing this since last December. Tucker Carlson Goes Full Anti-Vax, Says COVID Vaccine Is ‘Eugenics’ (Video).

Fox knows better than this. Rupert Murdoch, the network’s founder and executive chairman, was one of the first people in the world to get vaccinated, and Fox hosts have publicly acknowledged that they have also taken the vaccines (some have been more reticent). But the rhetoric of on-air personalities has diverged from Fox’s institutional behavior, as the network put ratings, money, and political gain over the health of its viewers.

And the rhetoric of Fox’s stars seems to be having an impact. Poll after poll finds that Republicans and conservatives are significantly less likely than Democrats to say that they are or plan to get vaccinated. Those findings mirror state-level vaccination rates, which are almost uniformly higher among states that supported Biden in the 2020 election than in states that supported Trump.

Republicans are far more likely to say they won't get vaccinated. Red states almost universally have lower rates of vaccination. No factor besides politics correlates as strongly to vaccination rates.

So, um, maybe politics is playing a role here?https://t.co/dU7FrnJwyN pic.twitter.com/elH0tgXzjM

— Philip Bump (@pbump) July 7, 2021

The delta variant seems to be poised to put our how-vaccine-politics-affects-the-pandemic theories to the test. https://t.co/ybBf1c1ILa pic.twitter.com/qrLWZhQx5w

— Philip Bump (@pbump) July 9, 2021

This vaccine hesitancy, which Fox hosts have done little to combat and much to encourage, will almost inevitably lead to the premature deaths of members of its audience.

Then there is Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) (sigh), chair of the GQP House Freedom (sic) Caucus – which truth in advertising would require it to be called the GQP House Fascist Caucus – and after the January 6 insurrection has been dubbed the GQP House Sedition Caucus.

The Hill reports, Freedom Caucus chair attacks Biden actions on vaccines:

Freedom Sedition Caucus Chair Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) is attacking President Biden’s plans to conduct door-to-door outreach to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations, calling the effort “deeply disturbing.”

Biggs and 31 other GOP House members confronted the administration on what he called a serious privacy violation in a letter sent to the president on Friday.

“There is no scenario where the federal government should be actively entering communities and traveling door-to-door to pressure Americans to receive a vaccine,” the letter reads.

The lawmakers asked officials to respond by July 23 to questions on whether the outreach is constitutional and if the government has created a database or has access to other databases to track those who have or haven’t received the shots.

Biden officials have repeatedly said the federal government does not intend to track vaccination status or institute vaccine passports.

Criticism on the administration’s plans for door-to-door campaign supporting vaccinations has ramped up since Biden mentioned the effort earlier this week as a way to boost lagging vaccination rates, along with general community-level outreach.

In a separate statement, Biggs requested that the administration put more focus on dealing with the border crisis, inflation and “the crime wave” in cities “instead of meddling in private medical decisions.”

Fox News talking points. Fuck off, Andy.

“The door-to-door spying on Americans is one more example of the burgeoning surveillance state by the national government,” he said.

When Donald Trump wanted the Census Bureau to ask Americans about their citizenship status in the 2020 Census – census takers do some door-to-door surveys in low response rate neighborhoods – was that also “spying”? This ignorant dumbass pisses me off more and more every day.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, both Republicans, have also condemned the door-to-door vaccination push, with Parson saying he doesn’t want the government to “compel” vaccinations.

Gov. Parson has been reckless and irresponsible and is literally killing his state’s residents. Missouri urges vaccination, warns of ‘widespread infection’ of delta variant:

With steadily climbing COVID-19 case rates, Missouri is heading toward “widespread infection” of the more contagious and deadly delta variant, the state’s epidemiologist said Friday[.]

The state this week issued a first-of-its-kind “hot spot advisory” for three counties in the Lake of the Ozarks region, urging residents to get a shot. The advisory warns of the delta variant spreading from the southwest and said the COVID case rates in the three counties could triple or more in coming weeks. Vaccination rates are 32% in Camden County, 26% in Morgan County and just 21% in Miller County.

The spread of the delta variant, which has inundated southwest Missouri hospitals, sets the region apart from the rest of the nation at a time when overall cases are close to their lowest levels since testing began.

Lisa Cox, a spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, told The Kansas City Star that the state has not conducted door-to-door vaccine promotion “but that’s not to say it hasn’t been utilized at the local level.”

“As with many issues through the pandemic, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work for every single community,” Cox said.

McMaster also joined in the disapproval, requesting Friday that health officials ban “targeted” door-to-door campaigns.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki countered McMaster’s remarks during a Friday press briefing, saying that the campaign has involved grassroots volunteers and clergy going door-to-door, not federal employees, since April.

Psaki then slayed this Republican moron.

“The failure to provide accurate public health information including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country including in South Carolina is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider that,” Psaki said.

Coronavirus task force member Jeff Zients also accused critics of the door-to-door plan of “feeding misinformation and trying to mischaracterize this type of ‘trusted messenger work.”

Earlier this year, Missouri agreed to a $55 million grant from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to increase vaccination rates, which included funding for door-to-door outreach as well as teaming up with community leaders, according to The Star. Doh!

These anti-science, anti-mask, anti-vax Republican morons are going to be responsible for the emergence of the “Red State” variant in the U.S. that is going to put all of us at risk again, including those of us who trusted the science and did the morally responsible and patriotic thing to do and got vaccinated. They can put the entire world at greater risk.

If the Trump death cult wants to die they should get on with it, and do it quickly. Spare the rest of us from the fallout of your cult insanity.