Tag: vaccination
When Will Anti-Vaxxers Face The Consequences Of Their Lies?

When Will Anti-Vaxxers Face The Consequences Of Their Lies?

"Medical Freedom" crusaders are trying to end vaccination requirements for schoolchildren. Places where they succeed, epidemiologists warn, will, for starters, become overrun with measles, a disease that was virtually eliminated thanks to vaccines.

Measles used to kill up to 500 people a year, while polio left more than 15,000 paralyzed. Parts of America that stop requiring vaccinations will be turning their clocks back to an unhappy past. And as it happens, those parts tend to be right-wing Republican.

No major religion objects to vaccines, but anti-vax activists summon religious objections to them nonetheless. Or they jump on a useful anecdote here or there.

One letter writer to The Wall Street Journal complained that months after getting a Covid booster, "I contracted Covid."

You don't say. So did I. But neither of us ended up in a hospital or the morgue. The shots make the disease less deadly.

A study by top epidemiologists estimates that nearly a quarter-million Americans who died of Covid would have survived had they received the Covid vaccine.

The letter writer was giving a thumbs up to Journal columnist Allysia Finley, who has turned casting aspersions on the Covid vaccines into a second career.

One of her columns, titled "Why Vaccine Skepticism is Growing on the Right" blames the medical establishment for many conservatives' refusal to get shots.

Perhaps ignorance, stupidity and laziness are to blame. Just a suggestion.

Anyhow, Finley writes, "Authorities no doubt worry that alerting the public to potential safety risks could discourage vaccination, but their lack of transparency and dismissal of critics fuels the distrust in vaccines."

Oh, so it's the authorities' fault that they didn't alert the public to safety risks that political wingnuts make up or highly exaggerate.

You know what political ballpark you're playing in when a writer accuses "the self-professed expert class" of "sneering" at anti-vaxxers.

I don't know about you, but experts, self-professed or quietly acknowledged, are the ones I follow. That's not to say that horoscopes don't give you a good idea of the future.

Do the experts really "sneer" at the anti-vaxxers, as Finley charges? If so, let me join them.

In January, Finley's column asked "Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants?" Note the weasel use of a question mark to cover the writer's rear end from a ridiculous contention.

And it is ridiculous. As Dr. David Wohl, an infectious disease specialist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine told CBS, "The virus is evolving because we keep transmitting it to each other."

In other words, "Vaccines don't fuel those variants; unvaccinated people do."

If right wingers choose to not protect their health or even their lives by refusing to get some simple shots, there will be fewer right wingers. A respected study found that early in the pandemic, deaths from Covid were about the same for Democrats and Republicans. Once the vaccine came out, though, excess deaths for Republicans were almost double those for Democrats. Perhaps it's in the right's interest to keep its voters alive.

Vaccine mandates are good in that they create a herd immunity that slows the spread of disease. Even though younger people infected with these viruses are at less risk of dying, they can pass them onto grandparents. That said, between 2021 and 2022, over 1,300 American children did die from Covid. And 20% of them had been healthy beforehand.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is now suing Pfizer over "misleading" claims about the efficacy of its Covid vaccine. He accused the drugmaker of intimidating critics by issuing social media posts that call out vaccine misinformation.

Imagine calling out vaccine misinformation. What terrible thing will those experts do next?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Whoopi Goldberg Shreds Bill Maher's Unfunny Anti-Mask Rant (VIDEO)

Whoopi Goldberg Shreds Bill Maher's Unfunny Anti-Mask Rant (VIDEO)

Whoopi Goldberg blasted HBO’s Bill Maher after the increasingly right-moving comedian declared he doesn’t want to live in pro-vaccine Americans’ “masked paranoid world” anymore.

On Monday’s The View, Goldberg called Maher’s remarks “not really funny to people who have lost their kids” or “family members or dear friends to this,” she said, apparently meaning to COVID. (She obviously misspoke, saying the “vaccine").

Maher on his HBO show on Friday had said, “I don’t want to live in your paranoid world anymore, your masked paranoid world anymore, you know, you go out it’s silly now. You know you have your mask, you have to have a card, you have the booster, they scan your head like you’re a cashier and I’m a bunch of bananas. I’m not bananas you are.”

Goldberg continued, saying, “Listen, nobody on the planet really wants to go through this, this is not something we’re doing because it’s, you know, sexually gratifying. This is what we’re doing to protect our families, and you don’t have to do it, but stay away from everybody. Because if you’re the one who’s not paying attention, and your confidence needs, you don’t want to then stay out of the public man. This is not, nobody wants this. I don’t want it. And I think he’s forgetting the people who are still at risk, who cannot get vaccinated. People who can’t get – little kids under the age of five. Yeah, well people with health conditions How dare you be so flippant, man?

Watch The Entire Exchange Below:

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Sen. Rand Paul Says He Won’t Get Vaccinated Despite CDC Recommendation

Sen. Rand Paul Says He Won’t Get Vaccinated Despite CDC Recommendation

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Sunday that he will not be getting a COVID-19 vaccination. Paul claimed that since he already had COVID-19, he believes he has immunity. Speaking with WABC radio in New York, Paul said he would not change his mind about not getting vaccinated unless he sees evidence proving that the vaccine is more effective than surviving from the actual virus. “Until they show me evidence that people who have already had the infection are dying in large numbers, or being hospitalized or getting very sick, I just made my own personal decision that I'm not getting vaccinated be...

Get Vaccinated Now, Mask Up Sometimes -- And Keep Using Common Sense

Get Vaccinated Now, Mask Up Sometimes -- And Keep Using Common Sense

Frankly, I've never understood why face masks were ever such a big deal. There's a deadly viral disease abroad in the land; it spreads through aerosolized particles emitted when people talk, sneeze or breathe heavily, particularly in crowded, indoor spaces. It seemed only a matter of common sense and common courtesy to wear a mask at the grocery store.

I don't like wearing socks either. But if they protected me, the people I love, and Maggie the Kroger pharmacist from intensive care or the graveyard, I'd wear two pairs at a time. What persuaded me was during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when Maggie sewed masks for the whole pharmacy staff back when masks were still hard to find. I'd already learned to trust her judgement.

Possibly the dumbest non-Trump moment during the whole Covid-19 saga (ingested bleach lately?) was when a crowd of fools in Idaho made a spectacle of themselves burning face masks to express their vigilant opposition to… Well to what? The existence of viruses? The reality of the pandemic? The tyranny of public health departments?

Politicians prating about lost "liberty" over face mask requirements struck me as similarly childish. The government also requires me to wear pants in public. Is that an infringement of my First Amendment right as an American to exhibit my posterior?

Nowhere near as dumb, because essentially harmless, are the many Americans who vow to continue wearing face masks pretty much forever. There's a meme going around on Facebook asking people if they plan to ditch the fool things in the wake of the CDC's (admittedly clumsy) pronouncement that fully-vaccinated individuals no longer need them.

See, the data's in: the vaccines work.

So far, more than a million fraidy-cats affirm that they plan to go masked indefinitely: MAGA hats for Democrats. Ever in search of ratings-building controversy, CNN news personalities have taken to pretending that the CDC guidelines are deeply confusing and potentially dangerous.

No, they're not. And yes, even the most dedicated worry-warts will gradually shed their masks in coming weeks as wearing one makes you look like a hopeless dork and CNN moves on to the next damned thing.

Even my sainted wife—a worry-wart if ever one was—will eventually lose every mask she owns and neglect to replace them. We'll be finding them in couch cushions and under ottomans for months. She forgot her mask at our favorite (outdoor) pizza place the other night, and I said nothing. See, I'd accidentally left mine in the car.

Everybody at our table was long-vaccinated, so what was the point?

But I'll keep going masked into the Kroger store for as long as they ask. So will everybody else. It's no big deal. That's why all this TV chatter about a one-size-fits-all national policy is beside the point. We live in a strong blue enclave in the deep red state of Arkansas. Locally, common sense compliance with mask mandates has been strong.

Out in the boondocks, however, it's a different story. The New York Times' interactive coronavirus tracker tells me that rural Perry County, where we lived until fairly recently, is at "high risk" for infection. Our friend Maurice says that nobody but him wears a mask at the filling station/feed store that serves as a community hub. As a former college professor, people expect him to be eccentric.

However, there have also been no Covid deaths and no new cases countywide for several weeks running. So you can almost understand why only 30 percent of citizens there have been vaccinated. Most residents of the county are cows.

Almost, that is, but not quite.

Vaccine hesitancy doesn't shock me. Apparently misled by Walter Winchell—the Tucker Carlson of his day—my own sainted mother refused to let me be vaccinated against polio. She had a superstitious nature and mistrusted expertise of all kinds. I finally got the shot after joining the Peace Corps.

Back here in town, masking customs have been evolving steadily since the vaccine arrived. For months, protocol at outdoor restaurants has been to wear one until you sit down, and then remove them. Pretty much the same custom now prevails at indoor restaurants that have recently reopened. Call me reckless, but I have never worn a mask during our daily dog park outing, merely kept my distance, as most people there do.

Dogs, not so much.

Compared to most people, dealing with the pandemic has been fairly easy for my wife and me. I've worked at home for many years, and she's retired. We've always preferred each other's company to anybody else's. We both read a lot, and I watch ballgames on TV. Since getting our shots last February, we've been re-emerging like two box turtles emerging from hibernation.

Take a few steps, pause, and then take a few more: the only national masking policy we really need.