COVID’s Revenge

 

For those RFK, Jr’s and the antivaxx MAGA consortium, falsely claiming that COVID vaccines killed more people than were helped (well under 1%, BTW), that Dr Anthony Fauci should be prosecuted as a false prophet and that COVID-prevention wreaked massive harm on American population, the that statistics that disprove all of the above keep rolling in. Note that while the average US life expectancy has declined by three years since 2019, the states that minimized COVID mitigation measures – from social distancing, masking, vaccination campaigns, to closures during peak outbreaks – also showed the shortage (and contracting) life expectancies (see above chart from the CDC – the darker colors have the longest life expectancy). These also tend to be the same states that have limited the expansion of Medicaid and whose Congressional representatives have argued against the Affordable Care Act.

As reported by Los Angeles Times writer, Karen Kaplan, examining CDC reports as of August 22nd, “More broadly, ‘states with the lowest life expectancy at birth were mostly Southern states,’ the report said. ‘States with the highest life expectancy at birth were predominantly Western ... and Northeastern states.’” It’s no coincidence that the states with the longest life expectancy are those that implemented the strongest COVID containment enforcement and championed vaccination the most. Hawaii, adding its island isolation to the containment effort, won the longest expectancy with 79.9 years.

We’re probably going to face other virulent outbreaks in the future, how contagious and dangerous we cannot yet tell. Not so strangely, the states that pulled back their COVID containment measures the most also have generally argued that “ending containment” was good for business, often mandating that the preventative measures would be illegal if continued in their state. Our MAGA sector rewrote history to suggest that we would have been better off if we had simply allowed “herd” immunity to serve as our only effective policy.

“[I]t has proven much harder to get people vaccinated against COVID-19 than against measles. As of September 2021, just over half of the US population was fully vaccinated against COVID-19—even though we know that the FDA-approved vaccines are extremely safe and have remained highly effective, even against new variants like the delta variant… In the U.S., someone who is vaccinated has less than 1/10th the risk of getting seriously ill as someone who is not.” Report from Johns Hopkins, 9/13/21 A combined study between Microsoft and Brown University, reported by NPR on 5/13/22, answered the following question regarding the US COVID outbreak:

“How many lives would have been saved if that slump in vaccine demand had never happened? To answer that question, Brown and Microsoft researchers calculated the peak vaccination rate for each state, and then imagined that rate continued until all adults in the state were fully vaccinated.

“The total for the country is stark: Many of the nearly 1 million COVID deaths took place in 2020 before the vaccines were available. But of the more than 641,000 people who died after vaccines were available, half of those deaths could have been averted – 318,981 – had every eligible adult gotten vaccinated. And those numbers are even more striking in certain states where more than half of deaths could have been avoided.” Particularly in southern states. But vaccinations were only part of the prevention efforts as noted above.

Lots of well-after-the-fact political reviewers are rewriting history. They say we made a mistake with all the vaccine and social distancing efforts. We might have taken a whole lot of seniors off the Social Security and Medicare rolls, lessening the cost to support those programs and may have even created lots of new jobs as vacancies appeared as we killed off lots of elders. What a benefit! Death as a component in saving taxes, although plenty of younger folks were lost, and many who survived are facing nasty long-COVID symptoms. As the August 26th Wall Street Journal points, four years following the peak of the pandemic, approximately one million Americans remain pushed out of the job market because of those lingering aftereffects.

We can indeed make “preventative medicine” for pandemics as thing of the past as a national policy on November 5th. We could vote Trump/MAGA, a party candidate who is seriously considering RFK, Jr to part if the cabinet as Health and Human Services Secretary. Or we can vote for the party that actually prioritizes its citizens’ lives over big business and one that generates its health policies based on empirical science and medical reality.

I’ve Peter Dekom, and personally, I would prefer to survive an obviously preventable demise from a pandemic… but some have other ideas or are simply in toxic denial.