Tag: vaccination

Polio vaccination rates are too low in some parts of the United States

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During the height of the polio epidemic in 1956

For more than 60 years, vaccines against the poliovirus have protected virtually everyone in the United States from the disease. Due to an enormously successful polio vaccination campaign beginning in the 1950s when the first polio vaccines became available, by 1979 polio was considered eliminated in the U.S.

Unfortunately, even today, there are communities in the U.S. that have lower-than-necessary polio vaccination rates. Because many people have not been vaccinated, there is now a real possibility of a resurgence of polio in the U.S….

…In July 2022, a man from Rockland County, New York, was diagnosed with polio, the first such diagnosis in the U.S. in nearly a decade. The patient – who developed the severe, paralytic form of the disease – had been exposed to an altered live vaccine strain from overseas.

Then on Sept. 9, 2022, New York declared a state of emergency due to ongoing poliovirus transmission. As of that date, using wastewater surveillance, officials had identified 57 samples of poliovirus in wastewater from four New York counties. More than half of those were detected in the same county where the adult patient is from, just outside New York City.

As a result of the continued poliovirus detection in wastewater, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that the U.S. now meets the World Health Organization’s criteria for “a country with circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus.”

OK. Unless you live near the trouble spots in the WHO report, you’re probably not in trouble. Yet. As long as you’re vaccinated. As long as you’re in a community with vaccination levels that qualify as providing “herd immunity”.

This news article provides lots of info. And the basic premise is the same for any comparable disease. You need to be vaccinated to even be capable of being out of danger.

Nearly Extinct Wild Polio Virus Resurfaces in Malawi

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Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP

The nearly extinct disease polio has made an unexpected and unwelcome reappearance in Africa. This week, health officials in the country of Malawi reported a case of wild polio in a young child—the first spotted in the continent in more than five years. World Health Organization officials are now monitoring the situation…

The virus used to infect millions a year and paralyzed tens of thousands of Americans, often children, during major outbreaks around the mid-20th century. With the help of effective vaccines since the 1950s, though, polio has been steadily beaten back. It’s on track to become the second (or possibly third) infectious disease of mankind to be fully wiped out. In 2021, there were only five wild polio cases reported in two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and just a year earlier, the WHO certified that Africa had become wild polio-free, after years of surveillance had found no signs of circulation—both of which makes this recent case all the more disheartening…

“As long as wild polio exists anywhere in the world all countries remain at risk of importation of the virus,” said Matshidiso Moeti, World Health Organization Regional Director for Africa, in a statement. “Following the detection of wild polio in Malawi, we’re taking urgent measures to forestall its potential spread. Thanks to a high level of polio surveillance in the continent and the capacity to quickly detect the virus, we can swiftly launch a rapid response and protect children from the debilitating impact of this disease.”

All you can do is keep at it. Keep vaccinating, keep expanding care and concern in those few parts of the world where this terrible disease remains.

My sister and I were volunteers for the first generation of polio vaccine. I can still see in my mind’s eye the last young man in our neighborhood living out his life on crutches. The last case of polio in the East End of Bridgeport..

Some white evangelicals immune to good sense about vaccination

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Bob Enyart, anti-vax Christian, lied about COVID, died of COVID

White evangelical Christians have resisted getting vaccinated against COVID-19 at higher rates than other religious groups in the United States. A new study by Yale researchers provides evidence that persuading these vaccine holdouts to get their shots has only gotten more difficult.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combines two survey experiments testing the effectiveness of various persuasive messages in shifting white evangelicals’ attitudes about vaccination. The first survey was conducted in October 2020, while Donald Trump was president and before the COVID-19 vaccines were approved for use in the United States, and the second occurred in May 2021, several months after people started getting jabs.

The initial survey, fielded on a nationally representative sample of 855 white evangelicals, gauged how various messages affected white evangelicals’ intentions to get vaccinated, their willingness to advise a friend to get the shots, and their judgments of people who refuse the vaccine…However, the same message(s) proved ineffective in the second survey, which was performed on a nationally representative sample of 2,419 unvaccinated white evangelicals.

Neither survey showed that values-based messaging was successful at persuading white evangelicals to get vaccinated, contrasting with prior research that has found that values-consistent messaging increased positive attitudes towards masking among members of the same group.

RTFA. Sad, but, true! An in-depth article is published this coming weekend in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Science Conquered Diphtheria, the Plague Among Children

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Inoculated horse, still the source of life-saving antitoxin

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, diphtheria challenged doctors with the terrible specter of children choked, smothered, snuffed out. It brought terror to the richest and the poorest, blighting famous families and anonymous ones…

Then, toward the end of the 19th century, scientists started identifying the bacteria that caused this human misery—giving the pathogen a name and delineating its poisonous weapon. It was diphtheria that led researchers around the world to unite in an unprecedented effort, using laboratory investigations to come up with new treatments for struggling, suffocating victims…

In the 1980s…there were only a few cases a year in the United States. Since 2000, there have been only six reported cases in the U.S….the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted some 8,800 cases reported overseas in 2017. In places where people aren’t getting vaccinated, or are slacking off on booster shots, diphtheria is finding its way back. And the standard treatment, little changed in more than a century, is in short supply.

The author takes the tale back to the beginning of research that led to discovery of the bacillus and, eventually, to treatment by antitoxin – and then to a vaccine.

I’ve posted before of children in my neighborhood getting together in spring to figure out who died over winter. Most often, those deaths were from diphtheria. And when the vaccine came to my elementary school for the first time, I was in that first group to be vaccinated. I was 7.

Only 1 student refused. His family were members of some religion that rejected vaccination. I’ve never missed one offered. Even volunteering for a few that were still experimental. Worth it to help others.

World’s largest employer will require COVID-19 vaccination

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Bloomberg News/AP/Lolita C. Baldor

The Pentagon will require members of the U.S. military to get the COVID-19 vaccine by Sept. 15, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press. That deadline could be pushed up if the vaccine receives final FDA approval or infection rates continue to rise…

The memo is expected to go out Monday…

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision comes a bit more than a week after President Joe Biden told defense officials to develop a plan requiring troops to get shots as part of a broader campaign to increase vaccinations in the federal workforce. It reflects similar decisions by governments and companies around the world, as nations struggle with the highly contagious delta variant that has sent new U.S. cases, hospitalizations and deaths surging to heights not seen since the peaks last winter…

Austin said in his memo that the military services will have the next few weeks to prepare, determine how many vaccines they need, and how this mandate will be implemented. The additional time, however, also is a nod to the bitter political divisiveness over the vaccine and the knowledge that making it mandatory will likely trigger opposition from vaccine opponents across the state and federal governments, Congress and the American population.

It also provides time for the FDA to give final approval to the Pfizer vaccine, which is expected early next month. Without that formal approval, Austin would need a waiver from Biden to make the shots mandatory…

The decision will add the COVID-19 vaccine to a list of other inoculations that service members are already required to get. Depending on their location around the world, service members can get as many as 17 different vaccines.

No surprise that the military has sufficient courage to challenge the pimps and populists infesting Congress, state legislatures and local politics in the GOUSA. Gung Ho!

p.s. That comment is only about politicians. The lowest form of life on Earth.

Unvaccinated are “variant factories”

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Unvaccinated people do more than merely risk their own health. They’re also a risk to everyone if they become infected with coronavirus, infectious disease specialists say.

That’s because the only source of new coronavirus variants is the body of an infected person.

“Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN Friday.

“The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply,” Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said.

“When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road.”

This ain’t news. The failure of sufficient immunization ain’t news either. Both are repetitive examples of mediocre health education in our school systems. Altogether, the sum of cowardice of government, politicians in and out of office, to confront superstition, religion and just plain ignorance in our society.

Covid is already deadlier this year than all of 2020

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A return to a sense of normalcy in the U.S. has been boosted by the country’s relatively high vaccination rates, with 53% of the population having received at least one dose. By contrast, some of the world’s poorest countries are yet to register a single dose…

Speaking on Tuesday during a news conference on the pandemic, White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said the highly transmissible delta variant was the “greatest threat” to the nation’s attempt to eliminate Covid.

Delta, first identified in India, now makes up about 20% of all new cases in the United States, up from 10% about two weeks ago, Fauci said. He has previously warned the country must avoid falling into the trap of believing the coronavirus crisis was over and no longer needed to be addressed…

Health experts are concerned about the spread of the highly transmissible delta variant. The Covid variant first identified in India is thought to be on track to become the dominant strain of the disease worldwide.

Former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Thursday that the spread of the delta variant in the U.S. was “highly concerning,” noting its prevalence in the country is currently doubling every 10 to 14 days.

Sadly, most Americans fail at understanding public health questions at rates similar to their understanding of mathematics. Worth worrying about.

Unvaccinated? You’re in trouble!

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David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

As much of the country emerges from masking and social distancing, undervaccinated pockets in the U.S. still threaten to bring the virus roaring back.

Less than 25% of the population is fully vaccinated in at least 482 counties, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by Bloomberg News. Many of these counties are more rural and less economically advantaged than the rest of the U.S., and a majority of their voters in the last presidential election chose Donald Trump, according to the analysis of 2,700 U.S. counties.

Though more than 174 million Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine, accounting for about 64.6% of the adult population, such averages belie stark gaps in vaccination rates at a local level. With more contagious versions of the virus like the delta variant taking hold, this creates opportunities for further spread.

Hidden pockets of low rates of vaccinations at the local level have been a challenge before in the U.S. “When you start to look at communities, you start to really unveil very, very low vaccination rates that tend to get averaged out when you’re looking at the entire country or even on an entire state,” said Maimuna Majumder, a health informatics researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. Viruses don’t spread at a national or statewide level, she said, but among friends, family and neighbors in a community, passing it to each other as people go about their daily lives.

I find it difficult to write polite phrases about people who choose to remain unvaccinated. Whatever the reason. It matters not whether religion or ignorance, fear or just plain stupidity governs your decision-making. You’re not only risking your own life. Apparently, you don’t care if you kill your children, your neighbors or the folks who live down the street.

The reasons for getting vaccinated aren’t new. I had to learn about them the first time I was vaccinated. That was in 1947. This is nothing daring. It doesn’t take anymore brains than stopping for a red light.

If Fox News were around in the 50’s…

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Thanks, gocomics.org

This commentary is excerpted from an email I sent off literally 5 minutes before I saw tonight’s cartoon.

In the 1940’s – when I was a kid in elementary school and spring came around to the East End of Bridgeport, there were a couple of constants. (1) We’d get ready to start playing baseball, again. There always were seasonal pickup games of basketball or football; but, baseball was the sport for our neighborhood. (2) We’d look around as kids would start gathering to and from school, afternoon sports time, weekends – to see who died over winter.

Diphtheria vaccination was becoming widespread; still, we’d always lose at least one kid over winter. Going into spring and summer, polio was the scariest. There often was a survivor or two clattering through the neighborhood on crutches … And another one or two missing.

We learned to embrace vaccination, parents and kids alike, as the best modern survival medicine on Earth. I can’t recall more than one True Believer of the breast-beating Christian category who refused to be vaccinated. And, yes, he died before he was old enough to vote. My peers and I said, “he got what he deserved”.

Our government, our educators, have grown soft in the head and lax since the bad old days … Ignoring the propaganda of religious nutballs and ignoranus conservatives. They deserve the blame … and most of the responsibility to bring education and understanding back up to standard. In my not-at-all-humble opinion.

Ed Campbell