Anti-vax protests are on the rise worldwide, still building here in the United States. Despite clear and convincing statistical evidence of the life-saving efficacy of vaccination (one that seems to invite boosters as new variants appear and work against immunity wanes after the passage of time), there are millions of Americans who still refuse the shots. Some for political reasons, even though their leaders, including Donald Trump, seem to have repudiated their own resistance to accept not just the basic inoculation but the boosters as well. Others operate out of fear based on a serious pattern of disinformation that seems to defy correction.
Hospitals across the nation remain packed to the gills with new COVID patients, often occupying critical space needed for the “normal” influx of critical care patients. Accident victims, folks facing heart attacks and strokes and other serious, life threatening ailments requiring hospitalization. All across the United States, people are dying from what was supposed to be a less-damaging but more infectious Omicron variant, which no one believes will be the last variant in this SARS-family mega-disease. Here in Los Angeles Country, fairly reflective of hospital results all over the United States, that “less dangerous” Omicron variant is still killing with alarming efficacy. Omicron, to put it mildly, is fast.
“The spread of the latest coronavirus variant has moved with unprecedented speed since December, although officials have said people who get infected with Omicron generally get less severe symptoms than with the earlier Delta variant. Even so, officials say it is fatal for some… Of 102 deaths reported Thursday [1/20] — the highest single-day tally since March 10 — 90% involved people who became ill with COVID-19 after Christmas, and 80% were among those who fell ill after New Year’s Day, indicating a high likelihood of Omicron infection, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said.
“It appears that people who are dying from the Omicron variant are deteriorating much more quickly than those infected by earlier variants, Ferrer told reporters… ‘It means that for the people who are, in fact, ending up passing away from COVID, if they were infected with Omicron, it looks like they get hit pretty hard earlier on,’ Ferrer said.
“During the summer Delta wave, COVID-19 patients were diagnosed with a coronavirus infection or started having symptoms four to five weeks before their deaths. But among fatalities reported late last week, many had an initial onset of symptoms or first diagnosis three weeks or earlier before their deaths… ‘That’s a relatively short period of time between the time somebody gets infected, gets their symptoms and then passes away,’ Ferrer said.” Los Angeles Times, January 25th.
Antivaxxers operate under the clearly misguided belief that their constitutional rights are being violated by health mandates, self-righteously believing that not getting vaccinated or being able to enter unmasked workspaces and schools, any place where people are allowed to congregate, is their most fundamental right, despite the 1905 Supreme Court case, Jacobson vs Massachusetts, that has long since held otherwise. The movement has expanded of late to oppose school vaccinations in general. That we have contained crippling diseases such as polio, smallpox, tetanus/typhus and measles through school-mandated vaccinations seems irrelevant. They seem to believe that they have a “right to infect” and that those with whom they deal have to live with this reality.
On January 13th, the self-appointed neo-legislative body, the Supreme Court, drilled down into the OSHA’s expertise to impose their own, conservative and medically unsustainable view of protecting workers: except for healthcare workers (logic defies how this category found exemption), Biden’s big-company healthcare vaccine-or-test OSHA mandate for workplaces was reversed. The Court stated that this level of medical micromanagement required specific congressional approval. 80 million workers were instantly impacted. Seriously? Congress should review deeply researched workplace rules that have, to date, been well within the statutory purview of OSHA experts?
The conservative justices who voted to reverse this rule were openly aware that their decision would result in thousands of unnecessary deaths and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary hospitalizations. They knew that our economy was still reeling, reflected in labor shortages and inflationary supply chain disruption, in significant part because too many potential workers were scared to go back to work for fear of COVID exposure. Breakthrough infections, though generally not super-serious, made that return to work even more terrifying. So what?!
“The Labor Department estimated the rule would have saved thousands of lives and prevented more than 250,000 hospitalizations during the six months after implementation [of this ruling]… ‘Workplace transmission has been a major factor in the spread of COVID-19,’ said Dr. Gerald Harmon, president of the American Medical Association, which supported the [OSHA] requirement… The rule would have boosted the nationwide vaccination rate, which has been stuck at around 60% of the U.S. population.
“At least 90% of the population needs to be either vaccinated or have some immunity from an infection to minimize the effects of COVID-19 on daily life, according to three experts who were on Biden’s COVID-19 transition team. They outlined that estimate and the importance of mandates in a paper published this month in the Journal of American Medicine… ‘Few countries have achieved such levels of coverage of any vaccine without vaccination requirements,’ they wrote.” USA Today, January 17th.
The harsh reality is that COVID-19 is a global pandemic, and even when the infection and mortality numbers subside, humanity still faces potential new variants… perhaps other comparably infectious new diseases as well… because we are so hideously behind in containing this coronavirus. Even as new treatments evolve, and older vaccines and treatments lose their effectiveness against variants, we are likely to live in a world where COVID is endemic (part of ordinary life) for the foreseeable future.
For example, Regeneron has lost most of its effectiveness against Omicron, and it matters which vaccine is applied, a clear signal that future variants may simply evolve to resist existing vaccines, particularly those that are not mRNA based. The results from the Chinese vaccine, Sinovac (a non-mRNA inoculation), are less than stellar: “An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine. Antibody levels against omicron rose among those who had also received a booster shot of the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech.
“But when researchers compared these samples with blood serum samples stored at Yale, they found that even those who had received two Sinovac shots and a booster had antibody levels that were only about the same as those who’d received two shots of the mRNA vaccines but no booster shot. In other studies, the two-shot mRNA regimen without a booster has been shown to offer only limited protection against omicron.” Yale News, January 20th.
We are still facing an uphill battle, our economy will not resume a reasonable path to normalcy, unless we can begin to contain this virus… and those who absurdly believe that vaccines and masks are unacceptable intrusions into their lives. What is their responsibility for the unnecessary deaths and suffering? It should be significant. But it isn’t.
I’m Peter Dekom, and there appears to be dwindling level of accountability, particularly in the United States, for selfish decisions from COVID containment to political violence and voting rights, that is slowly destroying us.
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