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      Biden announces plan to get booster shots to 100m Americans amid Omicron arrival in US

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      Biden announces plan to get booster shots to 100m Americans amid Omicron arrival in USPresident lays out pandemic battle plan for the winter months, including expanded pharmacy availability for vaccines Joe Biden announced new actions to combat the coronavirus in the US, including a nationwide campaign encouraging vaccine boosters, an expansion of at-home tests and tighter restrictions on international travel.Buffeted by the emergence of the Omicron variant and a political backlash from Republicans, the US president visited the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, on Thursday and laid out a pandemic battle plan for the winter months.“My plan pulls no punches,” Biden said “It is a plan that should unite us.”US expected to require stricter testing protocols for international travelersRead moreBiden announced steps to ensure that the nearly 100 million eligible Americans who have not yet received their booster shot do so as soon as possible, the White House said. There is new urgency to the effort after the first US case of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 was identified in California on Wednesday and a second one in Minnesota on Thursday.The president pledged to expand pharmacy availability during December while pharmacy partners send millions of texts, calls and emails to eligible customers with information on how to schedule an appointment or walk in for a booster shot.There will also be a public education campaign to encourage adults to get boosters, with a particular focus on the elderly. It will feature paid advertising across multiple channels, engagement with community organisations and media campaigns.The fight against the coronavirus in the US has politically divided the country with Republicans often seeking to undermine efforts to mandate public health policies around masks and vaccines.Biden directly took on the politicization of health policy, calling it a “sad commentary” on the state of politics in the US. He said his new measures should appeal to all Americans. “This is a moment we can put the divisiveness behind us, I hope,” he said.But, in addressing the threat from the Omicron variant, Biden threw a veiled punch at the often chaotic record of his predecessor, Donald Trump, whose efforts to combat the coronavirus were often marked by inconsistencies, quack cures and conspiracy theories. “We are going to fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion,” he said.Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to Biden on Covid-19, told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that boosting was “very important”, particularly when considering the rise in antibodies following a third dose.He added: “Even though we don’t have a lot of data on it, there’s every reason to believe that kind of increase that you get with the boost would be helpful at least in preventing severe disease of a variant like Omicron.”The emergence of Omicron has demonstrated the tenacity of the virus, which continues to drag down Biden’s political fortunes. Voters are divided on his handling of the pandemic, with 47% approving and 49% disapproving, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll.But the White House defended his record, for example by pointing out that when he came into office more than half of schools were closed, where today 99% are fully open and in person. On Thursday, the president will unveil actions to get more children aged five and older vaccinated.These include the launch of hundreds of family vaccination clinics across the country, offering a “one-stop shop” of first shots for parents, teenagers and children, and boosters for those eligible. There will be “family vaccination days” with hundreds of community health centres across the country hosting family vaccination clinics throughout December.Biden also set out a plan to ensure that Americans have access to free at-home testing. More than 150 million people with private insurance will be able to get at-home tests reimbursed; for those not covered, at-home tests will be distributed through health centres and rural clinics.With the threat posed by the Omicron variant still uncertain, early next week the US will tighten pre-departure testing protocols by requiring all inbound international travellers to test within one day of departure, regardless of nationality or vaccination status.In a briefing call with reporters, a senior administration official said: “We have really strengthened our international travel system pretty dramatically over the last month or so.“We believe that tightening that testing requirement for pre-departure will help catch more potential cases of people who may be positive when they fly into the country and so now is the right time to do it, and we can implement it very quickly.”On domestic flights, the official added, “the masking requirement is in place already and in fact we will be extending that requirement from January all the way until mid-March”.The pandemic has killed almost 780,000 people in the US. Nearly 60% of Americans are fully vaccinated. This week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued updated guidance recommending that every adult get a booster.TopicsUS newsJoe BidenBiden administrationCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Fauci: US could face ‘fifth wave’ of Covid as Omicron variant nears

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      Fauci: US could face ‘fifth wave’ of Covid as Omicron variant nears
      Collins and Fauci emphasise need for vaccines and boosters
      Warning that variant shows signs of heightened transmissibility
      Coronavirus: live coverage
      Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said on Sunday the US has “the potential to go into a fifth wave” of coronavirus infections amid rising cases and stagnating vaccination rates. He also warned that the newly discovered Omicron variant shows signs of heightened transmissibility.Biden and Harris briefed as US braces for arrival of Omicron Covid variantRead moreAs Fauci toured the US political talkshows, countries around the world including the US scrambled to guard against Omicron, which has stoked fears of vaccine resistance.A White House official told reporters Joe Biden would meet members of his Covid-19 response team, including Fauci, regarding the Omicron variant.Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Fauci discussed why Omicron has raised such alarm.“Right now we have the window into the mutations that are in this new variant,” he said, “and they are troublesome in the fact that there are about 32 or more variants in that very important spike protein of the virus, which is the business end of the virus.“In other words, the profile of the mutations strongly suggest that it’s going to have an advantage in transmissibility and that it might evade immune protection that you would get, for example, from the monoclonal antibody or from the convalescent serum after a person’s been infected and possibly even against some of the vaccine-induced antibodies.“So it’s not necessarily that that’s going to happen, but it’s a strong indication that we really need to be prepared for that.”Fauci also pointed to how Covid case numbers shifted dramatically in South Africa, where Omicron was discovered, over a short period.“You were having a low level of infection, and then all of a sudden, there was this big spike … and when the South Africans looked at it, they said, ‘Oh my goodness. This is a different virus than we’ve been dealing with.’“So it clearly is giving indication that it has the capability of transmitting rapidly. That’s the thing that’s causing us now to be concerned, but also to put the pressure on ourselves now to do something about our presentation for this.”The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said no Omicron cases have been discovered in the US.Fauci told NBC: “As we all know, when you have a virus that has already gone to multiple countries, inevitably, it will be here.”On CBS, Fauci said any fifth wave of cases “will really be dependent upon what we do in the next few weeks to a couple of months”.“We have now about 62 million people in the country who are eligible to be vaccinated,” he added, “who have not yet gotten vaccinated.“Superimpose upon that the fact that, unquestionably, the people who got vaccinated six, seven, eight, nine, 10 months ago, we’re starting to see an understandable diminution in the level of immunity. It’s called waning immunity, and it was seen more emphatically in other countries before we saw it here.”Fauci said an increase in immunization rates and booster shots might prevent another surge – but the US had to act fast.“So if we now do what I’m talking about in an intense way, we may be able to blunt that,” Fauci said. “If we don’t do it successfully, it is certainly conceivable and maybe likely that we will see another bit of a surge. How bad it gets is dependent upon us and how we mitigate.”Politically charged resistance to vaccine mandates and other public health measures would seem to make a rapid increase in US vaccination rates unlikely.While more than 70% of US adults are fully vaccinated, the most recent CDC data indicated that cases had increased 16% over the prior week’s seven-day average. By Sunday there had been 48,202,506 cases in the US with 776, 537 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.Another senior US government scientist, the National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins, discussed the Omicron variant on Sunday.“I think the main thing that has us focused on this,” he told CNN’s State of the Union, “and it’s caused a lot of us to be sort of 24/7 on Zoom calls in the last four days, is that it has so many mutations”.Collins also said there were “good reasons to think it will probably be OK but we need to know the real answers to that and that’s going to take two or three weeks”.On Friday, Biden said the US would follow much of the rest of the world and impose restrictions on travel from South Africa and seven other countries. The restrictions, which Biden called “as a precautionary measure until we have more information”, will go into effect on Monday.Collins told CNN: “I know, America, you’re really tired of hearing these things, but the virus is not tired of us and it’s shape-shifting itself. If you imagine we’re on a racetrack here … it’s trying to catch up with us, and we have to use every kind of tool in our toolbox to keep that from getting into a situation that makes this worse.“We can do this but we have to do it all together.”Boris Johnson ‘ignored’ my plan to tackle deadly Covid variants – senior officialRead moreOn CBS, Fauci was also asked about Republican attacks on his reputation, over federal research prior to the coronavirus pandemic and about his role in the response under the Trump administration.“Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this,” he said. “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me.”Asked if he thought attacks were meant to scapegoat him and deflect attention from Donald Trump’s failures, Fauci said: “You have to be asleep not to figure that one out.”“I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying,” he said.TopicsCoronavirusAnthony FauciBiden administrationUS politicsInfectious diseasesVaccines and immunisationUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More

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      Trump stoked Covid in red states – but there are blue anti-vaxxers too | Robert Reich

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      Trump stoked Covid in red states – but there are blue anti-vaxxers tooRobert ReichAmong my neighbors in the bluest region of the bluest county of the bluest state in America, many don’t trust big pharma or the government – or simply choose to put themselves first Is there a relationship between Covid and politics? Sure seems so.Michigan leads US in Covid case count, accounting for one in 10 new casesRead moreBy the end of October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of counties Donald Trump won by wide margins had died from Covid. That was more than three times higher than the Covid death rate in heavily Biden counties, of 7.8 per 100,000.Counties where Trump received at least 70% of the vote had an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60%.Presumably, this is because Trump counties also have the highest unvaccinated rates in the US. Almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state.There are some obvious reasons why Trump voters have been hesitant to get vaccinated. Trump politicized the issue – making the jab a hallmark of his peculiar form of rightwing populism. He and Fox News spread false rumors and conspiracy theories about the vaccine. By the time Trump finally called on people to get vaccinated, the damage was already done.In other words, it’s the same trifecta of rightwing media, inadequate education and rejection of science that gave us Trump in the first place.But this isn’t the whole story, because the US as a whole trails every other advanced country in the rate of vaccinations. Why?In recent weeks I’ve discovered that several anti-vaxxers live around me – in the bluest region of the bluest county of the bluest state in America. I’ve known several for years. They are well-informed and well-educated. But they’re as opposed to getting a shot as any Trump anti-vaxxer.Some are ex-hippies, now in their late 60s and early 70s, who regard their bodies as “sacred” and don’t want anything or anyone to “invade” it.One, who grows her own food and lives by herself in a cabin not far from here, told me she didn’t want anything going into her body that she didn’t control. When I asked whether she had been vaccinated against smallpox, measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, she told me she assumed so but had been too small to have had knowledge or control.Others – also in their late 60s and early 70s – don’t trust big pharma. They see Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson as greedy global corporations in search of people to exploit and tax havens to park their exorbitant profits.“Why in hell would I trust a fucking thing Pfizer says or does?” one of them asked me.None of these people trusts the government. Their generation (which is also mine) came to political consciousness during the Vietnam war – a time when the American flag became an emblem of fascism, particularly in lefty coastal enclaves. They now believe the government has been so corrupted by big money that they don’t trust agencies charged with protecting the public.I’m sympathetic to their distrust of both big pharma and big government. But this doesn’t mean the science is wrong.One of them referred me to a 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which found that about a third of the drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 2001 and 2010 had safety problems after reaching the market.I checked and he’s correct. But he left out a critical fact: as soon as the FDA discovered the problems it forced manufacturers to pull the drugs or issue warnings.Deep down, I think these blue anti-vaxxers are motivated by something different from mere distrust. When I pointed out that they could well be endangering others (including me), they remained unmoved.When I suggested that their concerns, however valid, had to be weighed against the public’s overall interest in conquering this epidemic, they said they didn’t care.My conclusion: They’re infected not by Covid but by a narcissism that refuses even to consider the risks and costs they’re imposing on others.Has living through Covid made me a hypochondriac? I asked some experts | Maeve HigginsRead moreI can’t say for sure that Trump anti-vaxxers share this narcissism, although the leader of their cult surely does. And, of course, my sample size was so small I can’t even generalize to all blue anti-vaxxers.If we blame Trump and the culture that produced him for the relatively low rate of vaccinations in the US, we’re missing a character trait that may offer a fuller explanation.This trait is found among Democrats and independents in blue America as well as Republicans in Trumpland. In fact, I think it’s been near the core of the American personality since before the founding of the nation – a stubborn, selfish, me-first individualism.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsCoronavirusOpinionUS politicsUS domestic policyDemocratsRepublicansUS healthcareInfectious diseasescommentReuse this content More

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      Conservative judges block Biden’s vaccine requirement for businesses

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      Conservative judges block Biden’s vaccine requirement for businessesPanel of judges rules stay of requirement for businesses with 100 or more workers is ‘firmly in the public interest’ Judges appointed by Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan declined on Friday to lift a stay on the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine requirement for businesses with 100 or more workers.LA has imposed the strictest vaccine mandate in the US. Will it prevent a Covid surge?Read moreOne law professor said the move showed the court was “radical and anti-science”.Under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) requirement, such workers must be vaccinated by 4 January or use masks and weekly tests.The measure is softer than those implemented by many private businesses and state or local governments, and the Biden administration has expressed confidence in its legality.Nonetheless, the fifth US circuit court of appeals, based in New Orleans and one of the most conservative federal panels, granted an emergency stay last Saturday.Justice and labor department lawyers filed a response on Monday in which they said stopping the requirement would prolong the Covid-19 pandemic and “cost dozens or even hundreds of lives per day”.On Friday, a three-judge panel rejected that argument. In his ruling, Judge Kurt D Engelhardt wrote that the stay was “firmly in the public interest” and referred to the Osha requirement as a “Mandate”, with a capital “m”.More than 762,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the US, from a caseload of nearly 47m. Nonetheless, vaccine mandates, rules and requirements and other public health measures are the focus of concentrated opposition among Republican voters and politicians, including many jockeying for the presidential nomination in 2024.More than 434m doses of vaccines have been administered and more than 194 million Americans, or 58.5% of the population, are fully vaccinated.Resistance to vaccine mandates has produced protests and fears of staff shortages. At the same time, the Biden administration has heralded strong jobs numbers and what it says is an economy rebounding from its Covid battering.Engelhardt said “the mere specter of the Mandate” had stoked “workplace strife” and “contributed to untold economic upheaval in recent months”.“Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address.”Experts say Covid remains a grave danger. Writing for the Guardian, Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and executive vice-president of Scripps Research, said the US was “sitting in the zone of denial”.“We are already seeing signs that the US is destined to succumb to more Covid spread,” Topol said, “with more than three weeks sitting at a plateau of ~75,000 new cases per day, now there’s been a 10% rise in the past week.“We are miles from any semblance of Covid containment, facing winter and the increased reliance of being indoors with inadequate ventilation and air filtration, along with the imminent holiday gatherings.“Now is the time for the US to … pull out all the stops. Promote primary vaccination and boosters like there’s no tomorrow. Aggressively counter the pervasive misinformation and disinformation. Accelerate and expand the vaccine mandates that unfortunately became necessary and have been proven effective, and mass distribute medical quality masks and rapid home testing kits at no cost.”Judge Engelhardt said the Biden business requirement potentially violated the commerce clause of the US constitution.“The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon [businesses] by deputising their participation in Osha’s regulatory scheme,” he wrote, “exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road.”Federal judges routinely claim to be above politics. But the system for nominating and appointing them runs through the Senate, where Republicans are aggressive in seeking to tilt the bench their way.Engelhardt was nominated by Trump and confirmed in 2018, as was Stephen Kyle Duncan, who joined Engelhardt’s opinion on Friday. So did Edith H Jones, a Reagan appointee in 1985.Amy Coney Barrett claims supreme court ‘not comprised of partisan hacks’Read moreAll three have links to the Federalist Society, a conservative group which has worked with Republicans in Congress to install judges including Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, supreme court justices nominated by Trump.At least 27 states have filed challenges to the Osha vaccine rule in federal appeals courts. The federal government said in court filings the cases should be consolidated and one circuit court should be chosen at random on 16 November to hear it. Administration lawyers also say there is no reason to keep the requirement on hold while the court where the cases ultimately land remains undetermined.In an email, Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said the fifth circuit was “acting politically”.“But it also seems to be attempting to dictate the terms of the debate and to be violating the intent of Congress … to have an orderly system to resolve appeals when there are multiple challenges to an agency’s action and to prevent litigants from ‘forum shopping’ by racing to the courthouse to secure a decision from the court that it believes most favors the litigant’s position.“The appeals court which ‘wins’ the lottery and receives all of the challenges is free to ignore what the fifth circuit did or other courts may do.”On Twitter, Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said: “One factor federal courts must consider in granting or denying emergency motions is the ‘public interest’. [It is] ASTONISHING that the fifth circuit does not even MENTION prevention of death/disease from Covid as a public interest to justify the vaccine mandate”.He also said he did not “even think conservative is the right word” to describe the fifth circuit court.“It’s pretty radical and anti-science,” he said.TopicsUS newsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans resist mandates to curb Covid but lawsuits likely to prove futile

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      Republicans resist mandates to curb Covid but lawsuits likely to prove futileThe Biden administration is on solid legal ground in imposing Covid-related public health measures, scholars argue Republican elected officials continue to challenge government mandates aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19, but legal experts predict the lawsuits and bans on mandates will largely prove fruitless because the law allows for such public safety measures.But as those legal fights play out the US will probably still be riven by a dispute between mostly Democrats on one hand who argue they are trying to curb a deadly virus, and usually Republicans on the other who say the Biden administration is involved in government overreach, often using rhetoric that can veer into the conspiratorial.Republicans slam Biden vaccine rule for businesses as health groups defend itRead moreTen states filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers because it could “exacerbate an alarming shortage of health care workers, particularly in rural communities, that has already reached a boiling point”, the filing states. All the states but one have Republican attorneys general.That petition comes days after a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a federal vaccine requirement for large businesses in response to a lawsuit from Republican officials, businesses and religious groups challenging the rules.And judges in two states issued rulings on Wednesday offering potentially different outcomes for masking mandates in schools. In Texas, a federal judge ruled that Governor Greg Abbot’s ban on school mask mandates violated the rights of students with disabilities, which clears the way for districts to issue requirements for face coverings. The Texas attorney general tweeted that he was “considering all legal avenues to challenge this decision”.In Pennsylvania, a state court ruled that the state health secretary did not have the authority to issue a school mask mandate, but the Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, appealed, which means the requirement can for now remain in place.While the judicial rulings create hurdles for Democratic elected officials’ use of government authority to try to bring the pandemic to an end, legal experts say there is precedent for such health policy measures and that they will largely remain in place.“There is no fundamental right to wear or not wear a mask in the public square,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law whose focus is education law and policy, and constitutional law. “Even where some fundamental right might be impinged,” such as the right not to be vaccinated, “it doesn’t mean that it can’t be overridden if there is some compelling state interest for doing so.”The latest wave of lawsuits comes after the Biden administration last week announced rules concerning vaccinations for companies with 100 or more employees, and healthcare workers.The rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), which the federal court blocked, would take effect on 4 January and require large companies to ensure their employees have been vaccinated or regularly administer Covid-19 tests for those who decline the vaccine and require them to wear masks at work. It would affect an estimated 84 million workers.The rule concerning healthcare workers from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has the same deadline – with no option for weekly testing rather than vaccination. That would affect 76,000 providers and more than 17 million healthcare workers.The lawsuit concerning healthcare workers argues that the mandate is unreasonably broad in part because it includes staff who would probably not have contact with patients, such as construction crews.But Sidney Watson, director of the Center for Health Law Studies at Saint Louis University School of Law, argues that the administration is on solid legal ground in issuing the vaccine mandate because hospitals must comply with certain conditions in order to receive payment through the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which they are not required to participate in but which almost all hospitals do.The vaccination requirement “only applies to providers who step forward and say, ‘I want to take this federal money,’” said Watson.But the Republicans are also challenging the mandate on the basis that it could hurt rural hospitals, which are already facing a labor shortage and could lose more employees who do not want to get vaccinated. Hospitals across the country are having a difficult time finding nurses, but the problem is particularly acute in rural areas, according to reports from Vox and PBS.“We think the goal of having all employees in rural hospitals vaccinated is a good one. The problem is, the mandate and its timing may be difficult, especially if it leaves some hospitals with severe staff shortages,” said Brock Slabach, chief operations officer of the National Rural Health Association (NRHA), which is considering requesting during a public comment period that the CMS instead allow hospitals to regularly test unvaccinated workers, the same as the Osha rule for large companies.But Watson, of Saint Louis University, said she sees concern about the mandate causing large numbers of employees to quit their jobs or be fired as speculation. She points to places like New York, where the police union warned that a vaccine mandate would cause 10,000 police officers to be “pulled from [the] streets”, but the number of officers who were placed on unpaid leave was ultimately only 34.Despite his concerns about the mandate, Slabach does not expect courts to strike it down and is recommending that rural hospitals prepare to come into compliance with it.In addition to facing a labor shortage, the rural healthcare organizations must contend with a population base that is vaccinated against Covid-19 at a much lower rate than in urban areas. For example, in Pulaski county in central Missouri, only 17% of its more than 50,000 residents are fully vaccinated.As such, it’s crucial that hospitals in such areas employ staff that is fully vaccinated because they could see a surge in Covid cases, said Slabach.“When you complicate that with the fact that rural communities have populations that are more vulnerable to the disease itself, meaning they have co-morbid or chronic diseases,” then vaccination is “critically important”, Slabach added.TopicsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationBiden administrationRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans slam Biden vaccine rule for businesses as health groups defend it

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      US newsRepublicans slam Biden vaccine rule for businesses as health groups defend itDivided reaction to mandate requiring that large companies either vaccinate staff or administer tests mirrors vaccine rollout in US Eric BergerMon 8 Nov 2021 05.00 ESTLast modified on Mon 8 Nov 2021 12.07 ESTBiden administration plans to get US companies with 100 or more workers to vaccinate their staff or bring in regular tests have been welcomed by public health groups but slammed by Republicans and trade groups, who claim government overreach with negative economic consequences.Federal court temporarily blocks Biden’s vaccine mandate for larger businessesRead moreSuch divided reaction to the rules announced last week mirrors much of America’s problematic vaccine rollout, where social and political headwinds have seen vaccination take-up slow down worryingly. US vaccination rates are some of the lowest in industrialized countries where the vaccine is readily available.Subject at least to a temporary stay issued by a circuit court in New Orleans on Saturday, the new rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) will take effect on 4 January.It requires that large companies either ensure employees have been vaccinated or regularly administer Covid-19 tests and require masks at work for those who refuse to get the shot.The rule will affect an estimated 84 million workers.The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also issued a rule requiring healthcare workers to be vaccinated by the same deadline, with no option for weekly testing rather than vaccination. That will affect 76,000 providers and more than 17 million workers.The administration also extended a deadline for federal contractors to comply with the same sort of rule – vaccination without the testing option – from 8 December to 4 January.“Too many people remain unvaccinated for us to get out of this pandemic for good,” Joe Biden said in a statement.But the rules sparked new backlash from Republican lawmakers and conservative groups who described the measures as unconstitutional. Republican governors or attorneys general in 15 states plan to file lawsuits against the mandate, according to the Associated Press.“This rule is garbage,” South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, a Republican, said, according to the AP. “It’s unconstitutional and we will fight it.”Celebrating the Saturday ruling in Louisiana, the state attorney general, Jeff Landry, said: “The president will not impose medical procedures on the American people without the checks and balances afforded by the constitution.”While courts have largely declined to block state and local vaccine mandates, the federal government “has more constraints on it than state and local governments do when it comes to public health and vaccination”, said Lindsay Wiley, a public health law professor at American University.On whether the Osha rule could be overturned, Wiley said: “It’s difficult to predict, in part because the environment has become so politicized.”Plaintiffs could also seek to file lawsuits in circuits with conservative judges appointed by Donald Trump, Wiley said.Lawrence Gostin, a global health law expert at Georgetown Law, tweeted earlier this week that “Biden is on rock-solid legal ground. He’s acting to protect the US workforce and will get us all back to normal sooner.”But groups such as the National Retail Federation (NRF), the country’s largest retail trade group, condemned the Osha rule because they said it places an unreasonable burden on businesses during the holiday season, which for many ventures is the busiest time of the year.The NRF is requesting an extension of the deadlines, though Edwin Egee, a vice-president of the group, did not provide a preferred date.“NRF members have for months taken extraordinary efforts to distribute the vaccine, to incentivize the vaccine. We have been, and will continue to be, very much in favor of the vaccine and its efficacy,” Egee said.Republicans have also warned that the vaccine requirements could cause employees to quit. If faced with a mandate, 11% of the unvaccinated said they would be most likely to get the vaccine and 46% said they would opt for weekly testing, according to an October survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). More than a third of unvaccinated workers said they would quit if their employer required them to get a vaccine or get tested weekly. But that amounts to just 5% of all adults in the US.“When we are looking at the bigger picture amongst all adults … it’s a pretty small share of the population,” said Lunna Lopes, senior survey analyst for KFF.There is evidence that workers often opt to get vaccinated rather than lose their jobs. For example, Houston Methodist hospital required 25,000 workers to get a vaccine by 7 June, the Conversation, a non-profit news organization, reported. Before the mandate, about 15% of employees were unvaccinated. By mid-June, that had dropped to 3%.David Michaels, a former Osha chief now a professor of public health at George Washington University, argued the new rules would help businesses who wanted to institute requirements but were constrained by state and local rules or feared litigation.“This actually allows employers to do what they want to do and blame the federal government,” said Michaels, who has advised the Health Action Alliance, a coalition of corporations such as Starbucks and Amazon and non-profits such as the CDC Foundation and the Ad Council aimed at promoting Covid-19 vaccination and prevention.The rules will make the workplaces safer, Michaels said.“The retail industry should give a gift to the American people and start to be supportive of vaccination requirements,” Michaels said. “That’s the only way that we will save lives and return to normalcy. It’s outrageous to ask for an exception to a public health measure.”TopicsUS newsVaccines and immunisationCoronavirusBiden administrationUS politicsUS healthcareUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More

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      Why are so many NYPD officers fighting vaccination? | Akin Olla

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      OpinionCoronavirusWhy are so many NYPD officers fighting vaccination?Cops have been on the wrong side of public health for the entire pandemic – and yet they act like they are victims Thu 4 Nov 2021 14.24 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 14.26 EDTIn New York City, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York (PBA) tried and failed to block the city’s vaccine mandate for all city workers. New York City police officers have been on the wrong side of public health for most of the pandemic. Like other American police unions, the PBA uses its political clout and large coffers to push regressive policies and fight any move towards an even slightly more humane justice system.In an effort to prevent another rise in Covid-19 cases, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, introduced a mandate requiring all city employees to have received at least one dose of a vaccine by 29 October. Seventy-one per cent of all city officials are already vaccinated but, according to the PBA, roughly a third of uniformed police officers are not. Even optimistic assessments of the department’s vaccination rates as a whole lag behind the rates of city residents. Despite the fact that Covid-19 is the leading cause of death among US police officers, the PBA launched a lawsuit against the city to halt the mandate. A judge struck down the suit, but the PBA plans to appeal the decision.The police union loves to play the victim card and paint even its worst officers as heroes – like when it called for a slowdown strike after an officer was fired for his role in the 2014 death of Eric Garner. Yet when faced with a real threat to the lives of their members, and to the public those officers ostensibly serve, the unions’ leaders have chosen to oppose public health recommendations. While the police commissioner has at least urged officers to get vaccinated, the department and its individual officers haven’t exactly had a stellar record of behavior from earlier phases of the pandemic.In October, unmasked police officers forced a subway rider out of a station after he asked them to put on their masks as mandated by both the city’s transportation authority and the NYPD itself. This was not an isolated incident, according to the New York Times: “[t]he flouting of mask mandates by some police officers in New York City has been the subject of criticism throughout the pandemic. Face coverings have remained required on the city’s public transit and at indoor subway stations since April 2020. But many reports on social media and in local news outlets have drawn attention to instances of officers ignoring those rules.”This behavior is especially dangerous considering that officers interact face-to-face with the public on a daily basis. According to the Legal Aid Society, the NYPD illegally detained hundreds of people during the George Floyd uprising and the second surge of the pandemic. Protesters were allegedly held for longer periods of time than legally allowed, increasing their risk of contracting Covid-19 and potentially spreading it once released. One protester complained of police stuffing protesters in vans while the officers themselves were not wearing masks. The NYPD insists that these delays were not retaliatory and just another symptom of the pandemic, but the Legal Aid Society noted the similarity to a previous lawsuit over similar alleged events at the 2004 Republican national convention.In fact, the mere existence of such a large police department is a hindrance to public health. If current trends continue, the city will probably spend more than $10bn on the police department this year, including hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to settle lawsuits for police brutality and misconduct. In comparison, the city’s department of health and mental hygiene has a budget of $1.6bn.While city residents could have benefited from an increase in healthcare access, the city was busy maintaining the largest police department in the country, spending over $100,000 a year on average for every uniformed officer, according to Business Insider. Insider also notes that a single set of riot gear could provide personal protective equipment for 33 nurses. These numbers recall the dueling images of New York healthcare workers wearing trash bags during the earlier days of the pandemic, in contrast to the heavily armored officers sweeping through neighborhoods arresting people en masse.The NYPD spent $115m in overtime in the first two weeks of the George Floyd protests alone. And large sums of that money, in the form of membership dues and donations, find their way to police unions. Those unions shell out tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying, much of it to elect candidates seen as pro-police and “tough on crime”. According to Dan Quart, a New York State assembly member, the PBA has “had very significant and I would say disruptive influence in blocking so much important criminal legal reform of our criminal justice system”. Between 2015 and 2018, the union gave $78,500 to the state senate Republican campaign committee. In 2020 the union endorsed Donald Trump for re-election, its first endorsement of a presidential candidate in decades. This last fact alone speaks to the depravity of the union’s perspective and priorities.The PBA insists that the vaccine mandate will cause “chaos” – that 10,000 officers will be gone from the street, that dozens of patrol precincts will go unstaffed. This outcome seems unlikely. If it does happen, however, it may be a great experiment for the city. During their 2014 slowdown strike in response to anti-police brutality protests, officers decreased their “proactive” crime duties, cutting down patrols and only responding to active calls. The department expected the city to come crawling back in fear. But the opposite happened; a peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature Human Behavior found that residents actually reported a decline in major crime.The PBA may be setting itself up for another disappointment – and offering yet more evidence that we must defund police for the sake of public health and the public good.
      Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian
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      Surge in Colorado Covid cases could force hospitals to ration services

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      ColoradoSurge in Colorado Covid cases could force hospitals to ration servicesIncrease can be attributed in part to the almost 40% of the state population that has not been vaccinated Eric BergerThu 4 Nov 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 09.00 EDTEvan Faber’s 78-year-old father, Michael, has for the last three years had difficulty walking around his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Fabers hope that a spinal surgery scheduled for late December at a local hospital will help restore his balance and motor function.But now they are worried that the hospital will have to postpone the operation.That’s because a recent surge in Covid-19 cases around the state has increased the number of unvaccinated patients needing care and prompted concerns that hospitals may have to ration services for other issues.“If you have been waiting for an elective procedure for the last 18 months and are finally scheduled – you’re vaccinated, you don’t have Covid – your procedure might still get canceled if a hospital is totally full,” said Dr Anuj Mehta, a pulmonologist with Denver Health who serves on the governor’s expert emergency epidemic response committee. “While this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated at this point – and the surges in the hospital are entirely being driven by unvaccinated folks – it is having a massive bleed-over effect on to the entire population.”There are about 1,300 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 in Colorado, according to the New York Times data; that’s the highest number since December 2020, when more than 1,900 patients were hospitalized.That number has increased by 15% over the last two weeks, the third largest increase in the country, and at a time when the national picture for the US is of a Delta variant surge that is firmly on the way down.The trend in Colorado can be attributed in part to the almost 40% of the state population that has not been vaccinated and people again gathering indoors without masks. It also shows that, despite the national downward trends of infections, regional spikes can still happen that can cause havoc in state healthcare systems.“We clearly have events taking place in Colorado, as elsewhere, that are spreading infection,” said Dr Jon Samet, an epidemiologist who directs Covid-19 modeling for the state. “I know everyone would like for it to be 2019 all over again, but that’s not the case.”The state had also not had surges on the scale of other states, said Dr Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention and control for UCHealth.Other states “had flames from the get-go, whereas we have been smoldering along this whole time, and we are finally hitting that peak of saturation and seeing flames finally,” said Barron.Thirty per cent of Colorado hospitals are anticipating a shortage in the number of intensive care unit beds and 37% are anticipating staffing shortages within the next week, according to data from the Colorado department of public health and environment.“Staffing is becoming increasingly a problem, which is true everywhere throughout the country. We are seeing healthcare workers really burned out from everything the last two years,” said Mehta. “It just raises concerns that we are pushing the limits of how many patients we can take care of. We are still taking great care of everybody” at Denver Health, “but we are filling up fast.”In response to the surge, Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, on Sunday issued a pair of executive orders that allow the state to direct healthcare facilities to redirect patients to other centers and for the implementation of a protocol for healthcare workers to decide in an emergency who should be treated first.Mehta would also like to see the governor issue a statewide indoor mask mandate, something Polis has declined to do.“If we were to continue masking indoors, I think we would see a significant drop in transmission and hospitalization, and that would free us up to do the routine medical stuff that we do all the time,” Mehta said.Even though people who have been vaccinated against Covid face a very low risk of hospitalization, they still, of course, face other risks. The UCHealth system is seeing record number of patients with non-Covid issues, according to a spokesperson.“A year ago, most schools and businesses were virtual, and there were capacity limits on restaurants and other businesses,” Dan Weaver vice-president of communications for UCHealth stated in an email. “Now, with few people staying at home, we are seeing large numbers of traumas, other injuries, and non-Covid healthcare needs.”Even among healthy Colorado residents, the pandemic continues to affect their lives. Stephanie Danielson, a Boulder resident, had 60 children in her son and daughter’s Cub Scouts pack a year ago; there are now 10, in part because of ongoing concerns about the virus.The pack gathered for a hike in September for the first time in more than a year – and afterwards learned that a parent had tested positive for Covid.“As a leader, it felt defeating because we are trying so hard to bring back some normalcy to each other’s lives, and our very first time, we had this happen,” said Danielson, who works at Moxie Sozo, a branding agency in Boulder.Faber, the 40-year-old CEO of the company, just got a vaccine booster and said his life has not changed much because of the surge. But he continues to worry about his father, a retired restaurant owner.“Everything is so volatile, it’s a waiting game to see if [the surgery] will still happen,” said Faber. “It’s the circle of people just outside of the direct impact from Covid that are dealing” with the surge, “and I know there are more severe examples than this”.TopicsColoradoCoronavirusInfectious diseasesUS politicsVaccines and immunisationnewsReuse this content More