Two Americas: ‘A Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated’ – Which Is Entirely Preventable

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“There’s a clear message that is coming through — this is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” — CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

The United States recorded 79,310 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number is the highest in the world, exceeding recorded totals from Indonesia (54,000), the United Kingdom (51,949), and Brazil (45,591), and doubling that of India (38,079). The spiking case number matches the level hit in October 2020, a record at the time, though it would not remain so for long. Despite the effectiveness of multiple vaccines against the virus, vaccine hesitancy is fueling “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” according to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. The vast majority of all patients currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated, according to the CDC. U.S. Hits Highest Number of Daily New Coronavirus Cases in the World Again: Nearly 80,000.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said preliminary data from several states indicates that 99.5 percent of recent deaths from coronavirus are of individuals who were unvaccinated and could have been prevented with a vaccine. CDC: 99.5% of COVID-19 deaths are from unvaccinated individuals.

The Washington Post reports, Delta variant takes hold in U.S. as coronavirus cases rise nearly 70 percent:

Federal health officials sounded an alarm Friday about a surge in U.S. coronavirus infections fueled by the twin threats posed by the highly transmissible delta variant and a stagnation in efforts to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.

During a White House briefing, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the seven-day average of coronavirus infections soared nearly 70 percent in just one week, to about 26,300 cases a day. The seven-day average for hospitalizations has increased, too, climbing about 36 percent from the previous seven-day period, she said.

“There is a clear message that is coming through: This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Walensky said. “We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk, and communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well.”

Florida emerged as a national hot spot, accounting for 1 in 5 cases in the past week.

Maybe because Trump acolyte Governor Ron DeSantis is an anti-science, pro-virus “own the libs” fucking moron. DeSantis sells ‘Don’t Fauci My Florida’ merch as new coronavirus cases near highest in nation.

Do you know what you really own, governor? You are responsible for all the deaths of those who have died (or will die) because they listened to your reckless and irresponsible politicization of a public health crisis.

Like our own Governor Doug Ducey.

Fox News contributor Juan Williams writes, The GOP is criminally reckless on COVID (excerpt):

In a preview of these coming political games, many Republican politicians and conservative talk-show hosts are already trying to distract from the fact they’ve been discouraging Republicans from getting vaccinated.

Instead of admitting guilt for the virus gaining strength in Republican strongholds, the Trump crowd is positioning themselves as the lifesavers — betting that enough voters will forget they were the arsonists who started the blaze.

This grim political game is underway as 42 states have seen a spike in COVID-19 infections in the first week of July.

New daily cases have more than doubled in the past three weeks.

The single biggest reason is that millions of Republicans refuse to get vaccinated.

* * *

What happens if President Biden, facing a new surge in COVID, asks people to start wearing masks again? What happens if he suggests people stay home for a while to get the virus under control?

Here’s my bet:

The Republican Party — and former President Trump — will exploit public frustration to stir up votes in the 2022 midterms.

They will exaggerate public anger and sound economic alarms. Their goal will be to amplify the backlash against any renewed safety measures as a campaign issue.

This is the politics of the Trump Death Cult.

This evil plot is already taking shape. L.A. County will require masks indoors amid alarming rise in coronavirus cases; Biden’s surgeon general backs localized mask mandates as delta variant drives rise in covid cases:

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said Sunday that he supports individual counties reinstating mask mandates to combat local surges of the coronavirus among unvaccinated people — like Los Angeles County did last week — as the pathogen’s highly contagious delta variant drives a spike in infections and the Biden administration seeks to project a sense of cautious optimism about the country’s return to normalcy.

“It’s very reasonable for counties to take more mitigation measures like the mask rules you see coming out in L.A., and I anticipate that will happen in other parts of the country too,” Murthy said on ABC News’s “This Week.“

Murthy said such local orders are consistent with federal guidelines that permit local authorities to require prevention measures.

Huffpost adds:

Last Thursday, Murthy released his first advisory since he was appointed surgeon general by President Joe Biden, issuing a warning to the nation that the spread of COVID-19 misinformation was an “insidious threat” to the U.S. He called out tech companies for failing to rein in anti-vaccination posts, saying modern social media giants have “enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users.”

“They’ve designed product features, such as ‘Like’ buttons, that reward us for sharing emotionally charged content, not accurate content,” Murthy said at the White House last week. “And their algorithms tend to give us more of what we click on, pulling us deeper and deeper into a well of misinformation.”

This Soviet-style disinformation campaign from the anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-vaxxer conservative media has politicized vaccines to the point that the MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Trump now represents a substantial portion of the public who pose a serious public health threat because they are deliberately putting themselves, their family and friends, and everyone else in society at risk, out of the motivation to “own the libs” and to demonize medical professionals like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Just listen to the anti-vaxxer propaganda on Fox News sometime. (They are also criminally negligent, and Fox should lose its broadcast license for being a serious public health threat).

Dr. Anthony Fauci correctly observes that Smallpox and Polio wouldn’t have been eradicated with today’s ‘false information’:

Anthony Fauci said on Saturday that he thinks smallpox and polio would still be spreading in the U.S. if today’s “false information” were present then. (Image: Polio vaccinations in Kansas – 1957).

“If you look at the extraordinary historic success in eradicating smallpox and eliminating polio from most of the world, and we’re on the brink of eradicating polio, if we had the pushback for vaccines the way we’re seeing on certain media, I don’t think it would have been possible at all to not only eradicate smallpox; we probably would still have smallpox, and we probably would still have polio in this country,” Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in response to a question from “CNN Newsroom” host Jim Acosta.

“If we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now, if we had that back decades ago, I would be certain that we’d still have polio in this country,” he added.

The Guardian reports, Majority of Covid misinformation came from 12 people, report finds: “On Facebook alone, the dozen are responsible for 73% of all anti-vaccine content, though the vaccines have been deemed safe and effective by the US government and its regulatory agencies. And 95% of the Covid misinformation reported on these platforms were not removed.”

A new CBS News/YouGov poll of those Americans who are not vaccinated finds 74% of them would not get vaccinated even if their doctor recommended it, while another 16% said their doctor already has suggested it. Just 10% would get vaccinated if their doctor recommended it.

Hospitalization and death from Covid-19 is entirely preventable by the vaccines currently available in the United States. Allowing the Delta virus variant to spread amongst a host of willful Republicans will only allow the virus to mutate again into a far more virulent strain of Covid-19, which may render the current vaccines ineffective and put everyone at risk, including the vaccinated.

This is purposeful, intentional sabotage of a vaccination program by the Death Cult of Donald Trump. It is just as un-American as their MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection against the government on January 6, and potentially more consequential, not just to the United States, but to the world, and possibly all humanity.

Former Trump DHS official Miles Taylor (aka “Anonymous”),called the Republican Party the nation’s “No. 1 national security threat,” suggesting that the party surpasses that of ISIS, al Qaeda and Russia. Former Trump official: GOP now a bigger national security threat than “ISIS, al Qaeda and Russia”:

“I’ve spent my whole career not as a political operative. I’ve never worked on a campaign in my life other than campaigning against Trump. I’m a national security guy,” said former DHS official Miles Taylor in a Thursday interview on MSNBC. “I’ve worked in national security against ISIS, al Qaeda and Russia.”

He added: “And the No. 1 national security threat I’ve ever seen in my life to this country’s democracy is the party that I’m in: the Republican Party. It is the No. 1 national security threat to the United States of America.“

The only mistake the Biden administration made was trusting in the patriotism and common sense of Americans to do as they did before with the smallpox and polio vaccines. That America no longer exists. Now a substantial number of Americans belong to the Death Cult of Donald Trump.

The July 4th weekend was supposed to kick off a “Summer of Freedom” from the Covid-19 pandemic. If enough Americans were vaccinated, we could reach herd immunity, and the threat to our health and our economy and our lives would be over. Hopeful optimism led to premature claims of victory.

Appeals to patriotism with seditious insurrectionist Republicans have fallen on deaf ears. They have decided to sabotage what should have been another American success story over an infectious disease as part of a political strategy for 2022 and beyond. They are willing to sacrifice their own life, and the lives of their family, friends and coworkers, and anyone else, to do it.

The Washington Post reports, In this summer of covid freedom, disease experts warn: ‘The world needs a reality check’:

Maria Van Kerkhove, a World Health Organization epidemiologist, was in her Geneva office last weekend preparing for a keynote address when a simple phrase came to mind. She had been pondering the dismaying rise in coronavirus infections globally during the previous three weeks, a reversal of promising trends in late spring. The surge came as people across much of the Northern Hemisphere were moving around again in a suddenly freewheeling summer — as if the pandemic were over.

She wrote in her notebook: “The world needs a reality check.”

Van Kerkhove’s subsequent comments on Twitter pointing out the lack of social distancing drew predictable flak from the social media trolls, something she has gotten used to in the past year and a half. But she is not an outlier. Around the world, scientists and public health officials fear that the world’s protracted battle against the coronavirus is at a delicate and dangerous moment.

Reality checks abound. Coronavirus infections are surging in places with low vaccination rates. SARS-CoV-2 is continuing to mutate. Researchers have confirmed the delta variant is far more transmissible than earlier strains. Although the vaccines remain remarkably effective, the virus has bountiful opportunities to find new ways to evade immunity. Most of the world remains unvaccinated.

And so the end of the pandemic remains somewhere over the horizon.

“We’re getting further away from the end than we should be. We’re in a bad place right now globally,” Van Kerkhove said.

* * *

The vaccines, though marvels of basic and applied science, do not form an impenetrable shield against SARS-CoV-2. They work as advertised, meaning they usually prevent severe illness and death, but they do not deliver what is known as “sterilizing immunity.”

Many breakthrough infections will produce no symptoms. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided in May to track only breakthrough infections leading to hospitalization.

The CDC issued a statement Friday saying the agency has multiple programs, working with state and local partners, to track vaccine effectiveness.

“COVID-19 vaccines are effective and are a critical tool to help bring the pandemic under control. However, no vaccines are 100% effective at preventing illness in vaccinated people. There will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19. As with other vaccines, this is expected. As the number of people who are vaccinated goes up, the number of breakthrough cases is also expected to increase,” the CDC said.

The next reality check comes from the virus itself. The delta variant has mutations that significantly enhance transmissibility, and it is responsible for a majority of new infections in the United States as it outcompetes other strains. Mutations in the virus are inevitable and complicate forecasts of how the pandemic will play out. The world is in the midst of a global experiment in which a single virus is turning into a full Greek alphabet of distinct strains, each with its own suite of mutations.

“They’re evolving. Even the delta variant, we have two sublineages we are monitoring,” Van Kerkhove said. “Everyone is fixated on the delta, but we should be prepared for more.”

Get your vaccine shots, wear a mask in public (despite what the CDC has said), and continue to social distance. Your life and the lives of your family and friends depend on it. No more damn excuses!





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5 thoughts on “Two Americas: ‘A Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated’ – Which Is Entirely Preventable”

  2. Heather Digby Parton points out that “Republicans’ vaccine refusal is about more than just sabotaging Joe Biden”, https://www.salon.com/2021/07/19/republicans-vaccine-refusal-is-about-more-than-just-sabotaging-joe-biden/

    It is now clear that Republicans are going out of their way to ensure that COVID spreads and kills more people. In any normal society, you’d have to wonder how it could possibly serve these people to let their own voters get sick and die. But obviously, they’re just relying on their old playbook and have decided it’s politically profitable to make Biden’s vaccine distribution program fail. Their constituents are basically human sacrifices for the cause.

    [T]he Republican line is that Biden is failing because some people don’t trust him. And why don’t they trust him? Because Republicans, starting with Donald Trump, are lying to them about what Biden is doing. It’s a neat trick and one they’ve used quite successfully before. This time they’re actually killing people to own the libs.

  3. The leader of the Trump death cult is criminally negligent for his failures as president, and now as a saboteur of the vaccine program for which he wants to both claim credit while at the same time encouraging his cult followers not to get vaccinated.

    Steve Benen reports, “Trump’s rhetoric on vaccines takes a dramatic turn for the worse”, https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-s-rhetoric-vaccines-takes-dramatic-turn-worse-n1274359

    [Back in March Trump issued a statement which was pro-vaccine: Trump called the shots “beautiful” and suggested that “everyone” would be receiving them. His goal was clearly to seek acclaim for himself, prioritizing his ego over public needs — but the underlying point remained the same: Trump framed the distribution of vaccines as fundamentally a good thing.]

    Four months later, the Republican’s message has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Trump issued this written statement yesterday:

    “Joe Biden kept talking about how good of a job he’s doing on the distribution of the Vaccine that was developed by Operation Warp Speed or, quite simply, the Trump Administration. He’s not doing well at all. He’s way behind schedule, and people are refusing to take the Vaccine because they don’t trust his Administration, they don’t trust the Election results, and they certainly don’t trust the Fake News, which is refusing to tell the Truth.”

    The shift in posture is unmistakable: In March, the former president encouraged people — most notably his own conservative followers — to do the right thing, roll up their sleeves, and get vaccinated. In July, Trump’s new message implicitly suggests that only those who believe President Biden, election results, and independent news organizations are getting the shots.

    As infection numbers inch higher, this is plainly dangerous. The more vaccinations are politicized, the more it undermines public health.

    Also note the degree to which Trump is blaming Biden for far-right vaccine opponents’ refusals. The rhetoric introduces the possibility of a twisted incentive: Those who want to keep the Democratic White House “behind schedule” suddenly have another reason to avoid vaccinations.

    [N]o good can come of this. The Biden administration is engaged in a desperate campaign to protect public health and save lives — without regard for party or ideology. Everyone would benefit if the president’s Republican critics at least tried to be responsible.

  4. The MAGA/QAnon Trump Death cult aren’t “owning the libs.” Their sabotage of the vaccine program means they own the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” effects on U.S. the economy. “Dow sinks nearly 900 points as Delta variant fears hit Wall Street hard”, https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/19/investing/dow-stock-market-today/index.html

    Investors are getting spooked by the rising numbers of Covid-19 cases as the Delta variant spreads across the globe.

    The Dow fell about 900 points in late afternoon trading Monday, a drop of 2.5%. The S&P 500 fell 1.9% and the Nasdaq was 1.3% lower.

    This is shaping up to be the worst day for the Dow since a 943-point drop in late October.

    Investors feared that the Delta coronavirus variant could threaten the US economic recovery. Shares of companies in sectors that were widely thought to benefit most from the reopening of the economy are getting hit the hardest.

    Long-term bond rates continued to slide as well, a sign that fixed income investors are now far more worried about a Delta variant-induced economic slowdown than they are about rising inflation fears.

    Thanks Republicans! You assholes.

    This does mean that we are going to need the stimulus effect of the Democrats’ budget reconciliation infrastructure bill.

  5. The propagandists at Trump TV are hypocritical bastards. CNN reports “Fox has quietly implemented its own version of a vaccine passport while its top personalities attack them”, https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/19/media/fox-vaccine-passport/index.html

    Fox Corporation, the right-wing talk channel’s parent company, has quietly implemented the concept of a vaccine passport as workers slowly return back to the company’s offices.

    While Tucker Carlson, the host of White Power Hour for seditious insurrectionists, “has called the idea of vaccine passports the medical equivalent of ‘Jim Crow’ laws. And other Fox News personalities have spent months both trafficking in anti-vaxxer rhetoric and assailing the concept of showing proof of vaccination status.”

    Fox employees, including those who work at Fox News, received an email, obtained by CNN Business, from the company’s Human Resources department in early June that said Fox had “developed a secure, voluntary way for employees to self-attest their vaccination status.”
    The system allows for employees to self-report to Fox the dates their shots were administered and which vaccines were used.

    The company has encouraged employees to report their status, telling them that “providing this information to FOX will assist the company with space planning and contact tracing.”

    Employees who report their status are allowed to bypass the otherwise required daily health screening, according to a follow-up email those who reported their vaccination status received.

    “Thank you for providing FOX with your vaccination information,” the email said. “You no longer are required to complete your daily health screening through WorkCare/WorkMatters.”

    The concept, which was first reported Monday by Ryan Grim on The Hill’s morning streaming show, is known internally as “FOX Clear Pass.”

    While the “Fox Clear Pass” is voluntary for employees, and other companies have similar tools, it is still remarkable, given how vocal Fox’s top talent has been in criticizing the concept of vaccine passports.

    Fox News has spent months portraying the notion that people might be asked to show vaccination status as dangerous to personal freedom and anti-American.

    Fox has also hyped the rejection of vaccine passports by Republican elected officials like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    It’s not the first time that Fox has been so brazenly hypocritical about coronavirus precautions.

    While its television hosts railed against face masks, the company issued guidance recommending employees wear them. It also said it would require people attending tapings of host Greg Gutfeld’s show to wear masks.

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