U.S. May Soon Reach a Tipping Point on COVID-19 Vaccine Demand. Here’s Why That’s Concerning
As U.S. health officials race to get more COVID-19 shots into arms to control the virus, experts now warn the country will run into another challenge in the next few weeks: vaccine supply will likely outstrip demand.
“While timing may differ by state, we estimate that across the U.S. as a whole we will likely reach a tipping point on vaccine enthusiasm in the next 2 to 4 weeks,” the Kaiser Family Foundation said in a new report published Tuesday.
“Once this happens, efforts to encourage vaccination will become much harder, presenting a challenge to reaching the levels of herd immunity that are expected to be needed.”
18-Year-Old Undergoes 3 Brain Surgeries From Blood Clots After J&J Vaccine
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel said Burkey and other women experienced headaches and back pain prior to the discovery of blood clots.
The CDC panel also disclosed that Burkey was given heparin, a blood thinner which typically is standard treatment for blood clots, but in cases like Burkey’s, can actually make the condition worse.
“If someone comes in with this really rather rare syndrome of thrombotic thrombocytopenia where you get thromboses, the most common way to treat that would be with heparin,” White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said during an April 13 White House news briefing. “That would be a mistake in this situation because that could be dangerous and make the situation worse.”
‘This Week’ With Mary + Polly: Beware of the ‘Vaccine Hunters’
Children’s Health Defense reported:
This week, Mary Holland, Children’s Health Defense president, and Polly Tommey, co-producer of “Vaxxed,” cover the latest on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “full court press” to get everyone vaccinated and a German firm’s eye scan test for COVID — which is really just about commercializing your body.
Mary and Polly also discuss how plans to mix and match the COVID vaccines — which experts say “should” be safe — might really be about vaccine makers hoping to reduce adverse reactions.
We Are Turning COVID-19 Into a Young Person’s Disease
This means vaccines are working, but it also means many Americans are flipping how they think about COVID-19 risk. Adults who spent the past year worrying about their elderly parents are now worrying about their kids instead. The risks are not equivalent, of course:
Kids are 8,700 times less likely to die of COVID-19 compared with those older than 85. But “even if the risk is not particularly high, you’re still going to be extra protective of your kids,” says Sandra Albrecht, an epidemiologist at Columbia. “It’s just human nature.”
In coming months, parents may find themselves going back to normal while their kids still have to wear masks indoors. “It’s a very strange relationship to feel protected when your kids are still not,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. But some 30 million households have children still too young to be vaccinated; in these families, parents and caretakers, especially of the youngest children, will have to keep navigating this incongruous world.
Nation Faces ‘Hand-to-Hand Combat’ to Get Reluctant Americans Vaccinated
State health officials, business leaders, policymakers and politicians are struggling to figure out how to tailor their messages, and their tactics, to persuade not only the vaccine hesitant but also the indifferent. The work will be labor intensive, much of it may fall on private employers — but the risk is clear: if it takes too long to reach “herd immunity” — the point at which the spread of the virus slows — worrisome new variants could emerge that evade the vaccine.
“If you think of this as a war,” said Michael Carney, the senior vice president for emerging issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, “we’re about to enter the hand-to-hand combat phase of the war.”
Mr. Biden plans an address Wednesday afternoon, in part to mark the week that the United States will exceed 200 million shots. But the distribution of those shots in uneven: New Hampshire has given at least one shot to 59 percent of its citizens, adults and children, Mississippi and Alabama 30 percent.
Fake COVID-19 Vaccines Have Been Discovered by Pfizer in Mexico and Poland
“Everybody on the planet needs it. Many are desperate for it,” Pfizer’s world head of security Lev Kubiak told WSJ. “We have a very limited supply, a supply that will increase as we ramp up and other companies enter the vaccine space. In the interim, there is a perfect opportunity for criminals.”
Pfizer, together with Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, are the three primary producers of COVID vaccines. All three are working with law enforcement globally to police fake vaccine distribution.
Is Herd Immunity to COVID-19 Possible? Experts Increasingly Say No.
For almost a year, Americans have been looking forward to herd immunity, when enough people are protected through vaccination or past infection to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Once there, public officials have said, masks won’t be necessary and hugging and handshakes – not to mention gyms, bars and indoor dining – can return.
But even as more than half of adult Americans have received at least one dose of vaccine and many others are protected by recent infections, health experts are moving away from the idea of reaching some magic number.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, doesn’t want to talk about herd immunity anymore.
“Rather than concentrating on an elusive number, let’s get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can,” he said at a White House briefing last week, a sentiment he’s since repeated.
Yale Doctor Harvey Risch Calls COVID Lockdown ‘Counterproductive’
Answering questions about how countries have responded to COVID-19, Dr. Harvey Risch — a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of medicine — told Newsweek, “Once the virus became endemic, lockdown is counterproductive.”
“In our real world, the virus will continue to spread until it cannot reach enough new or susceptible people to infect, that is, herd immunity. Thus lockdown only prolongs the inevitable,” he wrote in response to Newsweek’s questions. “The reason that lockdown is counterproductive is that, as I said, the pandemic ends with herd immunity.”
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