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Tag: anti vaxx
Pennsylvania Republican Assists Vaccine Resisters As COVID Surges In Her District

Pennsylvania Republican Assists Vaccine Resisters As COVID Surges In Her District

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

With COVID-19’s Omicron variant spreading rapidly, Pennsylvania health officials and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf have been urging residents of the Keystone State to get vaccinated if they haven’t done so already — and booster shots for COVID-19 vaccines are widely available. But Rep. Leslie Rossi, a far-right MAGA Republican who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, is pandering to anti-vaxxers by offering “vaccination exemption assistance” in her district.

Rossi, who represents an area of Western Pennsylvania where hospitals area being overwhelmed by COVID-19 infections, offered her “assistance” in a newsletter.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Deb Erdley explains, “State Rep. Leslie Rossi, R-Unity, said she offered help to those seeking vaccination exemptions in response to growing inquiries from fearful constituents in her district, which includes portions of eastern Westmoreland and western Somerset Counties. Her newsletter landed in local mailboxes as Westmoreland County emergency management officials warned of a ‘desperate’ situation in local hospitals, where COVID-19 infections have surged among unvaccinated residents, sparking overcrowding in emergency rooms and a scarcity of beds in inpatient and intensive care units.”

Dr. Carol Fox, who serves as chief medical officer of Excela Health, told the Tribune-Review, “It is important to do all that can be done to prevent individuals from contracting COVID-19.”That includes getting vaccinated, getting booster shots and wearing protective face masks in public places." Rossi, however, insists on pandering to anti-vaxxers.

Rossi is the wingnut who created the Trump House, a cultish shrine to former President Donald Trump in Youngstown, Pennsylvania, which is in Westmoreland County and shouldn’t be confused with Youngstown, Ohio. Westmoreland County is part of the Greater Pittsburgh Area, although Pittsburgh is in neighboring Allegheny County.

According to Erdley, “Thousands of vaccine-eligible residents in Westmoreland and Somerset Counties have yet to be fully vaccinated…. The most recent COVID-19 report from the Pennsylvania Department of Health pegged deaths among Westmoreland County residents at 1027 since March 2020, when the pandemic arrived. Excela’s weekly report for December 2 underscored the health threats unvaccinated individuals face. That week, the hospital system reported 88 individuals hospitalized at Excela hospitals in Greensburg, Latrobe and Mt. Pleasant. Only nine of those individuals were fully vaccinated, and not one of the 13 individuals on ventilators was fully vaccinated.”

Poll: Atheists More Likely To Get Vaccinated Than White Evangelicals

Poll: Atheists More Likely To Get Vaccinated Than White Evangelicals

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Although some anti-vaxxers identify as liberal or progressive, the vast majority of people who have been angrily railing against COVID-19 vaccines in the United States have been far-right white evangelical fundamentalists, Christian nationalists and MAGA Republicans. And recent Pew Research polling has found that atheists have some of the United States’ highest COVID-19 vaccination rates.

According to Pew, 90 percent of atheists in the U.S. have been vaccinated for COVID-19 compared to only 57 percent of white fundamentalist evangelicals. Among the overall adult population in the U.S., 73 percent have been vaccinated.

None of that is to say that all people of faith are anti-vaxxers or that everyone who is religious in the U.S. is far-right politically. Some African-American AME churches, for example, have done an excellent job helping people in the African-American community get vaccinated for COVID-19. And there are plenty of people of faith who hold liberal/progressive views and don’t care for the right-wing white evangelical movement.

But strident anti-vaxxers in the U.S., in many cases, do tend to follow a certain pattern: white, far-right politically, open to conspiracy theories, stridently supportive of former President Donald Trump.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation cites the Pew Research poll as evidence that “atheists are among the best neighbors an American could wish for.”In a press release, FFRF Co-President Dan Barker is quoted as saying, “Atheists believe in this life, not an afterlife, and we don’t need a god to threaten us with hell to do the right thing. We’re good for goodness sake.”

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of FFRF, is quoted as saying, “This is one of the great moral issues of today — and religion is simply failing. Religious folks are often suspicious of a tiny little shot to prevent the spread of a lethal contagion that has killed 1 in every 500 Americans and has completely overwhelmed and overworked our heroes on the health care frontlines. It takes religion to make the immoral seem moral.”

Gaylor notes that Catholics, according to Pew, fare better than white evangelicals when it comes to getting vaccinated for COVID-19.

The FFRF co-president is quoted as saying, “It seems like a rare instance of American Catholics listening to their pope — and the pope having the correct message. Now, if he would only apply himself to the scourge of rape and abuse within his church.”

Since it was first reported in Wuhan, China two years ago in December 2019, COVID-19 has, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers in Baltimore, killed more than 5.3 million people worldwide. COVID-19 vaccines, however, offer considerable protection against the dangerous coronavirus — and President Joe Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s top medical expert in the white House, have been encouraging Americans to receive widely available booster shots.

Rand Paul’s Weak Case Against Mandatory Vaccines

Rand Paul’s Weak Case Against Mandatory Vaccines

The middle of a measles outbreak may not seem like the best time to stand up for the eccentric preferences of the people who caused it. But Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is a libertarian, which means he is used to challenging conventional wisdom. His thoughts on mandatory vaccinations, however, only confirm that conventional wisdom is sometimes genuine wisdom.

At a hearing Tuesday, Paul made two points in opposition to requiring measles inoculations for children. The first: “For myself and my children, I believe that the benefits of vaccines greatly outweigh the risks, but I still do not favor giving up on liberty for a false sense of security.”

The second: “There doesn’t seem to be enough evidence” that “parents who refuse to vaccinate their children risk spreading these diseases to the immunocompromised community.”

These were in keeping with his past statements. In 2015, he rejected mandatory vaccinations on the ground that “the state doesn’t own your children” while claiming to have “heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines” — though he later said, somewhat implausibly, that he didn’t mean to suggest vaccines caused the disorders.

All states require children to be vaccinated against various communicable diseases to enroll in public schools. But most let parents refuse if they have religious objections — and some let them decline for any reason. That turns out to be dangerous.

Paul is wrong on the issue of freedom versus public health, as many prominent libertarian thinkers agree. Individuals do have rights, and they include the right to decide what risks to take with their own lives and property. But they aren’t free to subject others to deadly harms.

Before a vaccine was invented, 450 to 500 Americans died each year of measles. By 2000, it had been eradicated in this country. But with the spread of anti-vaccine propaganda and state exemptions, the disease has made a comeback, infecting 159 people this year. Some legislatures are now considering abolishing virtually all exemptions as California, Mississippi and West Virginia have done.

Many so-called public health measures are really about private health — preventing people from harming themselves, say through smoking or drinking sugary soft drinks. Libertarians have good reason to oppose them. But mandatory vaccinations are about protecting people from the dangerous practices of their fellow citizens.

Parents have no right to expose other people — notably those too young or too sick to be inoculated — to a serious contagion by refusing to vaccinate their children. For that matter, they have no right to expose even their own kids to measles. The government doesn’t own them, but it is entitled to intervene to shield them from harm, even at the hands of their parents.

Libertarians look back fondly on the days when government was far less intrusive. But even then, mandatory immunizations were upheld by the Supreme Court.

In 1905, the court ruled in favor of such requirements, reasoning that “in every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

Critics claim that vaccines are unreasonably dangerous to recipients, causing autism and other ailments. But all the evidence is against them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says: “Vaccines are safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines save lives. Claims that vaccines are linked to autism, or are unsafe when administered according to the recommended schedule, have been disproven by a robust body of medical literature.”

After seeing Paul’s suggestion that unvaccinated kids are no threat to people with weakened immunity, I emailed his office asking for documentation. An aide got back to me but offered no evidence.

But Paul is wrong. Dr. Sean O’Leary, a spokesman for the AAP, told me that measles “is certainly potentially deadly, especially among the immunocompromised, and we now relatively have a much larger group of immunocompromised people in the U.S., thanks to new disease-modifying medications, better cancer treatments, etc. Many of the deaths from varicella (chickenpox) in the U.S. prior to the varicella vaccine were in immunocompromised patients.”

Steve Chapman blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman. Follow him on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Quick and Healthy: Bad Medicine

Quick and Healthy: Bad Medicine

“Quick & Healthy” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness that you may have missed this week:

  • After decades of giving it a free pass, the Food and Drug Administration signaled this week that it may begin to finally crack down on homeopathic treatments. Homeopathy, which involves the use of plants, herbs, and minerals to combat a variety of ailments, is widely considered to be a quack pseudoscience. Although the “remedies” may have some short-term value as placebos, it’s possible that they interfere with, or preclude patients from attaining, actual medical treatment.
  • Surprise! A new, highly exhaustive study shows that vaccines still do not cause autism — even among children who are at a higher risk. Researchers studied more than 95,000 children and found that receiving the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine did not lead to an increased chance of developing autism. Unfortunately, the anti-vaxxer crowd staunchly adheres to its discredited studies and paranoid theories, and other studies suggest that new scientific information not only won’t change their minds, but will make them more likely to double down on their beliefs.
  • 3D printers that use organic material  — known as “bioprinters” — have made incredible advances in the last few years, replacing body parts and generating entire organs. And now, a new biotech startup plans to begin creating synthetic eyeballs, a feat that eluded previous bioprinting efforts due to the eye’s complexity. As planned, the most advanced of the artificial eyeballs won’t just be a replacement body part — it will be an enhanced eye that allows you to apply filters to your vision or share what you see via wi-fi.
  • A startup is working on a new way to screen for breast and ovarian cancer that is non-invasive, effective, and, crucially, inexpensive. The new procedure tests saliva for the gene mutations most likely to lead to breast and ovarian cancer and Color Genomics, the startup behind the effort, plans to charge $249 for the procedure—a mere tenth of what other tests on the market charge. The hope is this will, in the words of Color Genomics’ chief executive, “democratize access to genetic testing.”

Photo: Homeopathic remedies (Jason Testler Guerilla Future via Flickr)