Five years ago this week the country shut down in response to Covid.
It isn't enough to be correct. Leaders need to be persuasive, too.
After all, this is a democracy.
Yesterday I wrote that Democratic policies on Covid may have saved my life. During 2000 to 2002, blue-state governors emphasized protecting the vulnerable, and seniors are the primary vulnerable group for the Covid virus. (Present tense. Covid is still around.) Democrats were punished politically for that policy. Business and school closures, physical separation, masks, and vaccination mandates were an intrusion on our freedom. Democrats kept the policies in place longer than a majority of Americans had patience for. Americans wanted to manage their own risks. Democrats heard a phrase turned back on them: "Our bodies, our choice."
Possibly no American president in history had the oratorical and leadership skills to have rallied the country to sacrifice for the team's health, at least not once we realized that the risk of hospitalization and death was low for the young and middle aged. We are Americans. Liberty and justice for all. Live free or die. Ability to persuade was not one of Biden's talents.
Physicians have written me in the past 24 hours, reiterating Covid data. There was a common theme: In a pandemic we are in this together. We need to cooperate. And the interventions we tried worked -- not perfectly -- but they worked. They saved lives. Wasn't that the point?
Bruce Van Zee was one of those physicians. He started a Substack blog, where he posts when something is on his mind: https://substack.com/@bvzcvz
Guest Post by Bruce Van Zee
I am a retired physician who was involved in the leadership of a local non-profit (Jefferson Regional Health Alliance) when the pandemic struck. I was struck by the misinformation being presented to the county commissioners and the resultant resistance to public health measures by some of them. Here are a few issues to note on both sides of the public health debate:
1. The CDC picked the six-foot distancing rule without much scientific evidence. It was a good faith effort to prevent transmission, but probably flawed.
2. Peter is correct that the CDC was disingenuous about masking. They should have said up front that the first priority for the limited supply was health-care providers.
3. That being said, there is no question that masks are and were effective in decreasing spread -- not nearly 100% but significantly. If you find a hospital or health care provider who says otherwise, you need to find a new provider.
4. Contact tracing by public health departments turned out to be fruitless; people were reluctant to share their contact history with someone they didn't know over the phone and there were not enough public health folks to follow through anyway.
5. Vaccines: Vaccine resistance plus an unhealthy and older population (compared with other countries that fared better) were major reasons for the high mortality in the United States. One vaccine, Johnson & Johnson's, did have significant side effects; some cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome and cases of clotting disorder. But the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were remarkably safe, despite the growing disinformation online. One of the few correlated side effects, myocarditis in young men, was generally mild and seen less frequently than in the disease itself. Right wing sources often cite the VAERS database maintained by the FDA and CDC inappropriately claiming a host of side effects and deaths. But the VAERS is an early warning system that requires providers to report any symptom or illness within weeks of any vaccine so there can be investigations into causality. Since millions of doses of mRNA vaccine were given once it was available, you can imagine that in the next few weeks and months some of those people might get sick or even die. But when investigated and statistical analysis was applied, there was no evidence of causality.
Do the vaccines work? Absolutely, but not perfectly. Since Covid is acquired through inhalation, the nasal and throat are first infected and can produce cold-like symptoms like any respiratory virus. But what the vaccine does is prevent serious illness, hospitalization, and death. During the peak of the pandemic, August of 2021, Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center had 182 of its 378 beds occupied by acutely ill Covid-19 patients. We were the sickest population in the country that month.
*** 93 percent of the 182 patients were unvaccinated.
*** 96 percent or the 53 patients in our ICU were unvaccinated.
*** 100 percent of the 21 patients on ventilators were unvaccinated, and most died.
So here's my question to the political right: I understand your devotion to protecting the vulnerable unborn. Where is that same compassion to protect those vulnerable to Covid (or other respiratory illness)? Is it too much to ask that you wear a mask in public? Is it too much to ask that you help establish herd immunity so that others are not infected?
In my mind, there are two reasons to refuse Covid vaccines, or other well-vetted ones. One is ignorance and the other is selfishness. Selfish, because if you know they protect, you are betting that others will undergo the minor inconvenience and risk to establish herd immunity so you don't have to.
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8 comments:
I am as vaccinated as it is possible to be, against Covid and everything else. But I am well educated and relatively smart.
The vast majority of the people in this country are not educated enough, or in some cases smart enough, to understand the science behind vaccines. That means they have to take it on trust that vaccines are safe and effective.
But our elites have proven themselves to be untrustworthy over and over again to the point where at least half the country doesn’t trust them anymore. That trust has to be reestablished, which will involve a painful process of truth and reconciliation.
I don’t know if our elites are up to that task. I hope they are…
Michael, I have to smile because this comment makes you sound a bit like an “elite” yourself. Of course there are different kinds, right? Ie economic, political, business, social, academic (like you), athletic, cultural, etc…. Maybe we need a more precise word for the kind we’re talking about instead of it being a pejorative? Oxford defines it as “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society”. But even they make mistakes.
Thank you for sharing Dr. Van Zee. Very insightful and thought-provoking.
A significant effect of the COVID-19 pandemic can be found in the burnout, early retirement, and career shifts in medical responders to the virus. The medical community did a super, all-hands-on-deck response to save our people from covid effects. Some routine isolation and sterile room procedures failed. Medical professionals got sickened and some died. The sadness is magnified by the fact that a new vaccine was available to stem the tide of the serious, and deadly effects of the virus, but was not immediately embraced by the general public. Instead, public opinion, for whatever reason, turned on the medical community. As a country, we find ourselves returning to the early 1900s with clearly controllable infections like measles on the rise around the country. Compounding the problem facing us is the new Secretary of HHS who wants to take us back even further to treatments in common practice before the Civil War. Our government has shut out our infectious disease early warning system, the World Health Organization (WHO), leaving us unprepared for seasonal flu, bird flu strains, Ebola and other emerging viruses, pathogenic bacteria, parasites, and pathogenic fungi.
Who I mean:
The financial elites who decided it would be a good idea to export all of our industrial capacity, leaving many communities and non-college-educated people devastated.
The cultural elites who decided it would be a good idea to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports, enforce pronoun etiquette, and otherwise impose woke ideology everywhere they could.
The medical elites who decided we needed to isolate to prevent the spread of Covid, unless we were gathering for Black Lives Matter protests.
Thank you, Dr. Van Zee, for providing factual information about COVID and the vaccines. Why some people would prefer to be misled by social media rather than heed the advice of those who know what they’re talking about is a mystery. Some blame “the elites” and in a way, that’s true. RFK, Jr and Trump are elites, and they get a lot of credit for the countless thousands whose deaths were preventable.
At the height of the pandemic, our hospitals were full of those who refused the free, life-saving vaccines being offered, while outside whackos were demonstrating against the health-care workers risking their own lives to try and save them. I think they should have been provided their own clinics, where they could get any quack cure Trump was peddling, whether it be hydroxychloroquine, horse de-wormer or bleach injections.
It's no surprise these would be the same people who believe Trump when he claims he won the 2020 election, that Jan. 6 was “a day of love,” or that immigrants are eating their cats and dogs.
“Elite” does not necessarily connote “elitist”, at least not to the extent that the supposed public good means non-elites may be willfully deceived as elites deem appropriate, and contrarian or whistle-blowing elites censored and vilified, all via conscripted news media and social media.
I took have had as many Moderna vaccines as possible. In fact my vaccination card has info and dates on the front and back.
Same for my wife.
We traveled extensively during the pandemic.
All were Moderna.
Additionally, I helped many of my neighbors here in Florida get vaccinated. They found the computer based sign up/reservation process cumbersome in the early days.
Despite our travels with friends, we've never contracted covid, despite being with people on trips who did contract covid..
The great mystery, "why haven't we ever contracted it?" What is so special about our genes and our body makeup.?
We are now in our 70s, surrounded by friends who've had covid several times, even vaccinated.
When we first heard of COVID it was said that a significant percentage of the infected population did not display symptoms, but these people without symptoms could spread COVID. I assume this is still a problem. This made/makes it hard to control COVID. I wish Dr. Van Zee could comment on this.
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