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      Covid kills a 9/11’s worth of Americans every three days. The vaccine mandate shouldn’t be controversial | Jill Filipovic

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      OpinionCoronavirusCovid kills a 9/11’s worth of Americans every three days. The vaccine mandate shouldn’t be controversialJill FilipovicTrue leadership means making the right decision even when it’s unpopular. Biden’s vaccine rule will save lives and get the economy on track Wed 15 Sep 2021 06.15 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Sep 2021 11.15 EDTThe Biden administration’s decision to require vaccinations for large segments of the workforce has been predictably controversial among Trump loyalists, vaccine deniers and rightwing media.It’s also the strongest moment of Joe Biden’s presidency.Leadership and strength are defined by moments like this one: a leader doing the right and necessary thing even when they know they will face criticism and possibly political consequences. Too many politicians follow rather than lead; they listen to the loudest voices and cow to the most aggressive bullies. This is today’s Republican party, with its many officeholders who have spent the years since November 2016 demonstrating that there is no bottom to the humiliations they are willing to endure and the compromises they are willing to make if it means they will keep their seats, prostrating themselves before the altar of Trumpism.Biden, like every politician, no doubt fears losing power. But he’s shown here that he has the integrity to put American lives and the stability of the nation ahead of his own professional ambitions. By one estimate, the Biden vaccine mandate will mean 12 million more Americans get the jab. That’s 12 million more people who will then be extremely unlikely to be hospitalized or die of Covid-19. It’s 12 million more people who can help keep the US economy afloat, and who are helping to keep their communities safe.The new Biden vaccine rules also reflect this administration’s insistence on responding effectively to a complicated reality instead of reacting to those who yell the loudest. It is true that there is a subset of the US population – disproportionately white, Trump-voting evangelicals – who strongly object to the Covid vaccine and say they will refuse to get it, requirements be damned. But there’s also a group of people who simply haven’t gotten their act together, or haven’t felt incentivized to get inoculated. There’s a lot to say about these folks – that they’re selfishly putting their communities at risk, that they aren’t being good citizens – and each of us is certainly entitled to our own moral judgments.But the Biden administration isn’t in the business of finger-wagging; it’s in charge of making effective policy. And the vaccine rule is exactly that: it gives people an excellent reason to choose vaccination, and gives many (although not all) categories of workers the alternative of a weekly Covid test – an inconvenience, to be sure, but hardly an unfair imposition in the face of a pandemic that is killing a 9/11’s worth of Americans every three days. Significantly, the vaccine rule also mandates time off work for vaccination and recovery from any side-effects.Resurgent Covid numbers are dragging the US economy down, and Biden is looking at a dark winter if more Americans don’t vax up. March 2020 kicked off an unprecedented financial disaster, with scores of people (a huge number of them mothers) losing their jobs as bars and restaurants shuttered, travel ground to a halt, schools closed and sent young children home, and we collectively understood that there was a “before time” and we were now living in the after. We know now that lockdowns didn’t primarily cause this massive economic contraction; fear of Covid did. And we know that the economic growth we’ve seen since Biden took office is partly credited to his administration’s massive vaccine rollout coupled with much-needed financial assistance to most Americans, which got inoculations into arms and people back into the streets, on to airplanes, and into restaurants with money to spend.The vaccine rollout gave Americans the choice to get the jab and protect their communities and their country, or forego it out of political obstinacy. (Some people, of course, cannot get the vaccine for health reasons, but those people are a small minority and not the ones dragging down the US’s stagnated vaccination numbers.) Shamefully, a huge number of Americans have refused to do the right thing. Some rely on arguments about individual freedom, and don’t seem to connect their individual decision to a collective problem – viruses, after all, don’t respect declarations of bodily autonomy and “my body, my choice”.And those refusing vaccination are also putting our collective livelihoods and our country’s economic wellbeing at risk: as the Delta variant continues to rage, more Americans are staying home. That means they are no longer supporting local businesses as often. Some are making the difficult decision to quit or scale back their own work so they can keep their unvaccinated kids at home instead of risking sending them to schools unmasked and with unvaccinated adults. All of those seemingly individual decisions add up to a bigger and much more troubling whole.So the Biden administration decided to take bold and decisive action, even though officials surely knew there would be outcry. One has to imagine they’re gambling on a payoff – an economy that doesn’t crash, for example, or the quieter majority of Americans who support vaccination and really want to see the pandemic get under control – but they are taking a risk nonetheless. Doing the right thing isn’t exactly an act of valor, but in today’s political universe of reactionary rightwing cowards, it is laudable.Yet many mainstream media sources have focused on the objections and the potential political blowback instead of the necessity of this rule, and the leadership that implementing it exemplifies.That’s a choice, too. Cynical conservatives have realized they can turn even the most commonsense measures into convenient political footballs, sending political reporters and talking heads scrambling to analyze the political fallout of rational rules and good policy. That in turn only reinforces the power of these bad actors.We don’t have to fall for it. Many Americans would surely agree that we want leaders who follow the scientific consensus and make decisions based on what is best for public health and the country’s economic wellbeing, even when those decisions are hard. Most of us would surely agree that we want leaders who lead instead of spinelessly acquiescing to the whims of those who throw the biggest tantrums.Joe Biden is leading despite the very predictable conservative outbursts. He’s refusing to keep the nation held hostage to the least informed but most self-righteous among us.That’s leadership, even if the Fox News crowd doesn’t like it.
      Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
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      Fears as more children falling ill in latest US Covid surge and school approaches

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      CoronavirusFears as more children falling ill in latest US Covid surge and school approachesNational Institutes of Health director says 1,450 kids in hospital Teachers union shifts, calls for vaccine mandates for teachers Edward HelmoreSun 8 Aug 2021 13.54 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 13.56 EDTAmid increased fears that children are now both victims and vectors of the latest Covid-19 variant surge, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins signaled on Sunday that increasing numbers of children are falling ill in the US.His comments also came as one of America’s largest teachers unions appeared to shift its position on mandatory vaccinations for teachers.With around 90 million adult Americans remaining unvaccinated, and vaccines remaining unauthorized for 12 years and under, Collins told ABC News This Week with George Stephanopoulos that “the largest number of children so far in the whole pandemic right now are in the hospital, 1,450 kids in the hospital from Covid-19.”Collins acknowledged that data on pediatric infections was incomplete but he said that he was “hearing from pediatricians that they’re concerned that, this time, the kids who are in the hospital are both more numerous and more seriously ill”.Collins’s comments came as new Covid-19 cases in the US have rebounded to more than 100,000 a day on average, returning to the levels of the winter surge six months ago. But health officials focus on children adds urgency to the situation as the US education system approaches the start of the school year.Collins said his advice to parents of school-age children is to “think about masks in the way that they ought to be thought about”.He added: “This is not a political statement or an invasion of your liberties. This is a life-saving medical device. And asking kids to wear a mask is uncomfortable, but, you know, kids are pretty resilient. We know that kids under 12 are likely to get infected and if we don’t have masks in schools, this virus will spread more widely.”The alternative, he said, “will probably result in outbreaks in schools and kids will have to go back to remote learning which is the one thing we really want to prevent”.Warning that virtual learning that kids have experienced for more than a year is “really bad for their development”, Collins urged that “we ought to be making every effort to make sure they can be back in the classroom. And the best way to do that is to be sure that masks are worn by the students, by the staff, by everybody.”The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, went further, calling for vaccine mandates for teachers. “As a matter of personal conscience, I think that we need to be working with our employers, not opposing them, on vaccine mandates,” she told NBC’s Meet The Press.Weingarten’s comments are an advance on the union’s earlier position in which it maintained teachers should be prioritized for the vaccines but stopped short of supporting a mandate. That shift was previewed last week when Weingarten said she would consider supporting vaccine mandates to keep students and staff safe and schools open.Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, also echoed Weingarten’s comments Sunday, saying the best way to protect children from the virus is to “surround them with those who can be vaccinated, whoever they are. Teachers, personnel in the school, anyone, get them vaccinated.”Dr Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, also weighed in on the concerns, saying that schools are not “inherently safe” from the Delta variant and that society “can’t expect the same outcome that we saw earlier with respect to the schools where we were largely able to control large outbreaks in the schools with a different set of behaviors.”“The challenge right now is that the infection is going to start to collide with the opening of school. And we have seen that the schools can become sources of community transmission when you’re dealing with more transmissible strains,” Gottleib told CBS’s Face the Nation.TopicsCoronavirusUS politicsSchoolsInfectious diseasesVaccines and immunisationnewsReuse this content More

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      Contempt for the unvaccinated is a temptation to be resisted | Dan Brooks

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      OpinionCoronavirusContempt for the unvaccinated is a temptation to be resistedDan BrooksThe narrative of a dangerously ignorant minority may appeal, but it is not good for democracy Mon 2 Aug 2021 11.50 EDTLast modified on Mon 2 Aug 2021 13.38 EDTThe Covid-19 pandemic was the perfect disaster for our cultural moment, because it made other people being wrong on the internet a matter of life and death.My use of the past tense here is aspirational. The emergence of the more contagious Delta variant threatens to undo a lot of progress – particularly here in the US, where active cases of coronavirus infection are up 149% from two weeks ago. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that fully vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in public spaces. The hope that this summer would mark our return to normal is curdling fast, and the enlightened majority – the fact-based, Facebook-sceptical, and fully vaccinated – are looking for someone to blame.A moralist might argue that the Delta variant is poetic justice in light of the US government’s reluctance to provide free vaccines to places such as India, where it first emerged. The notion that doses should be saved for Americans or exported at profit was selfish and shortsighted, and now the chickens (germs) have come home to roost (sickened millions). But this sort of pitiless self-recrimination is so old-fashioned. The modern person prefers to lay blame where it rests more comfortably: on other, dumber people. Take this tweet from a sportswriter, which implied that the people of Alabama – where the vaccination rate lingers at about 34% – would get the jab if the alternative meant no American football. Such remarks often play on the association between the American south and a certain type of person: culturally conservative, frequently undereducated, more interested in sports on TV than pandemics in the newspaper. This person, a kind of back-formation from various statistical trends, has become a familiar scapegoat during the coronavirus pandemic. They represent the obstinate minority – 30% of adults in the US – whose refusal to get vaccinated threatens to mess up the recovery for the rest of us.This narrative, which has become especially popular among American liberals, excoriates imaginary dummies instead of confronting the problems that have discouraged people from getting the jab. These problems include an employer-based healthcare system that favours professionals with permanent jobs and makes it difficult for many Americans to form trusting relationships with doctors. According to Kaiser Health News, the demographic with the lowest vaccination rate in the United States is uninsured people under the age of 65. The difficulty of reaching this group has been compounded by a world-historical explosion of misinformation and a political culture bent on pandering to it.The insistence, among the Republican leadership in the spring of 2020, that Covid-19 was a glorified version of the flu guaranteed that responses to the pandemic would shake out along political and, therefore, cultural lines. In places such as Alabama, not getting the vaccine has more to do with socio-economic identity than with scientific literacy. This is a fatal flaw in the reasoning of unvaccinated people, who are absolutely wrong in a way that endangers not only themselves but also others. But given the haughty reaction of many liberals, can you blame them? Even as the cost of their obstinacy has become grimly clear, the cost of admitting they were wrong has risen; to get the vaccine now would be to kowtow to a class that holds them in contempt. The notion that a vocal minority of our fellow citizens threaten to undo us with their ignorance has become something of a master narrative in anglophone democracies over the past five years. Trump did it for a lot of American Democrats in 2016, and Brexit – which, unlike Trump, won popular support at the polls but, like Trump, was overwhelmingly opposed by the urban and higher-educated – had a similar effect in the UK. The current Republican mania for making voting more difficult seems to be a product of Trump’s loss in November. Last week, a Pew Research Center poll found that 42% of respondents agreed with the statement: “Voting is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited.” This attitude is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.Don’t blame young people for vaccine hesitancy. The vast majority of us want to get jabbed | Lara SpiritRead moreThe belief that the masses are fundamentally decent and capable of governing themselves – or at least qualified to select leaders capable of governing for them – has been badly dented by social media, which confronts us with the ignorance of strangers at high volume every day. Basic forms of empathy, emerging from real-life communication, are fading from modern democracy, washed out of our assessment of the average stranger by a high-pressure spray of anonymous idiots on the internet.I think we should resist the urge to hold the unvaccinated in contempt. Their premises are wrong, but they are doing what we want citizens in a democracy to do: thinking for themselves, questioning authority, refusing to submit to a class they perceive as bent on ruling them by fiat. The fact that they are doing these things in the service of dangerous misinformation is a terrible irony, and it threatens the stability of 21st-century democracy.Covid-19 might be the most convincing counterargument to the western liberal tradition we see in our lifetimes. It offers a counterexample to two foundational ideas: that ordinary people can recognise their own best interests, and that the minority who do not can be afforded their freedom without endangering the rest of us. A plague is one of those classic exceptions that appears in the literature of political science again and again. I don’t know if existing systems can withstand it. I do know that, like a marriage, a democracy can survive anything but contempt.
      Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana
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      New US mask guidance prompted by evidence vaccinated can spread Delta

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      US newsNew US mask guidance prompted by evidence vaccinated can spread Delta CDC director Rochelle Walensky cites ‘new science’ People with outbreak infections can pass on virus Adam Gabbatt, Martin Pengelly and Maya YangWed 28 Jul 2021 10.18 EDTFirst published on Wed 28 Jul 2021 09.45 EDTThe director of the Centers for Disease Control and Protection spoke on Wednesday about evidence that vaccinated people can spread the Covid-19 Delta variant to others, after the nation’s top health agency expanded on its new guidance that fully vaccinated Americans wear masks indoors in certain places.Rochelle Walensky said “new science” observed in recent days demonstrated that new variants of the coronavirus were transmissible by people who have been fully vaccinated in some cases.Double-jabbed US and EU travellers can avoid England quarantine, ministers decideRead more“With prior variants, when people had these rare breakthrough infections, we didn’t see the capacity of them to spread the virus to others,” Walensky told CNN.“But with the Delta variant we now see in our outbreak investigations that have been occurring over the last couple of weeks, in those outbreak investigations we have been seeing that if you happen to have one of those breakthrough infections that you can actually now pass it to somebody else.”The CDC revised its mask guidance on Tuesday to recommend fully vaccinated Americans wear masks in “public indoor settings” with “substantial and high transmission”, a shift from its earlier guidance issued on 13 May, which said vaccinated individuals did not need to wear masks in most indoor settings.The move came as Joe Biden said requiring all federal workers to get a coronavirus vaccine is “under consideration” as the Delta variant surges in the US. Some local and state leaders, including New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the California governor, Gavin Newsom, have already announced such mandates for their government employees.Walensky also spoke on Wednesday about the threat of Covid-19 to children. “If you look at the mortality rate of Covid, just this past year for children, it’s more than twice the mortality rate that we see in influenza in a given year,” she said.On Tuesday the CDC changed its advice and now recommends that fully vaccinated people living with vulnerable household members, such as those who are immunocompromised and children, wear masks in indoor public spaces. In addition, the agency recommended everyone in K-12 schools wear masks, “including teachers, staff, students and visitors, regardless of vaccination status”, Walensky said in a press briefing on Tuesday.“In recent days I have seen new scientific data from recent outbreak investigations showing that the Delta variant behaves uniquely differently from past strains of the virus that cause Covid-19,” Walensky said on Tuesday, referring to scientists’ discovery of the Delta strain shedding as actively in breakthrough infections as it does in unvaccinated individuals, despite the rarity of breakthrough cases.For months Covid cases, deaths and hospitalizations were falling steadily, but the highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus has fueled steep rises in case numbers, particularly among unvaccinated Americans and amid struggles with disinformation and resistance, particularly on the political right.“Nobody wants to go backward but you have to deal with the facts on the ground, and the facts on the ground are that it’s a pretty scary time and there are a lot of vulnerable people,” Robert Wachter, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told the Washington Post.“I think the biggest thing we got wrong was not anticipating that 30% of the country would choose not to be vaccinated.”In recent weeks, a growing number of cities and towns have restored indoor masking rules. St Louis, Savannah, Georgia, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, are among the places that reimposed mask mandates this month.At a White House briefing last week, the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, said 97% of hospital admissions and 99.5% of Covid deaths were occurring among unvaccinated people.More than 162.7 million Americans are vaccinated – or 49% of the population, according to the CDC.California and New York City announced on Monday that they would require all government employees to get the coronavirus vaccine or face weekly Covid-19 testing, and the Department of Veterans Affairs became the first major federal agency to require healthcare workers to receive the shot.In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all municipal workers – including teachers and police officers – will be required to get vaccinated by mid-September or face weekly Covid-19 testing, making the city one of the largest employers in the US to take such action.“Let’s be clear about why this is so important: this is about our recovery,” De Blasio said.California said it will similarly require proof of vaccination or weekly testing for all state workers and healthcare employees starting next month.Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsUS newsCoronavirusInfectious diseasesUS politicsBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More