Category: COVID-19

Trump was so weak with COVID he dropped his overnight bag at Walter Reed after only carrying it a few feet: new book

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Previous stories have revealed that former President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 infection was far worse than had originally been reported. It was revealed earlier that Trump was on supplemental oxygen at the White House, but his oxygen rate dropped so low that White House staff grew concerned. That’s when Trump was given the option of walking out to the helicopter or being wheeled out in front of the press.

In Michael Bender’s new book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” it was revealed that Trump was so ill that chief of staff Mark Meadows was asking staff to pray for him. 

White House reporters were worried that Trump might come over to them, not knowing just how bad he was. They made a pact, the book says, that they would ask him to maintain his distance for their protection. Continue reading.

Canada could open to vaccinated U.S. tourists as soon as August, Trudeau says

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NOTE: This article is provided free to read by The Washington Post.

Canada could reopen its borders to vaccinated travelers from all countries by early September, and possibly welcome immunized Americans as soon as mid-August, the office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said late Thursday.

Canada closed its land border with the United States in March 2020 as the pandemic first accelerated, and it has since restricted entry for other foreign visitors to help stem the spread of the virus.

But now, as vaccination rates climb and transmission slows, those controls could be lifted in the coming weeks, Trudeau said in a call with Canadian provincial leaders Thursday.

GOP vaccine resistance poses growing challenge in pandemic fight

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Growing GOP resistance to COVID-19 vaccines is raising alarms among public health experts and creating a major challenge as the U.S. tries to move past a pandemic that has lasted almost a year and a half.

Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference cheered talk of a lower-than-expected vaccination rate over the weekend. Tennessee is ending outreach to adolescents on vaccines, including for COVID-19, amid pressure from state GOP lawmakers. And a range of conservative media hosts and lawmakers have expressed concerns over the vaccine and the Biden administration’s outreach efforts.

The resistance helps explain why more than 30 percent of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated, with even higher percentages in Republican-leaning states, leaving places with lower vaccination rates at risk of localized surges of the virus. Continue reading.

Anti-vaxxers gain power on right, triggering new fears

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Public health experts are growing increasingly concerned about a rise in anti-vaccination rhetoric among elected officials and right-wing media as a new wave of coronavirus infections begins to wash over Americans who have yet to get vaccinated.

Legislators in more than 40 states have introduced measures to bar vaccine passports, and many Republican governors have signed executive orders or laws barring their use. 

In some cases, Republican governors and legislators are now repeating far-right talking points questioning the safety and effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines, in spite of the overwhelming scientific evidence that the vaccines developed in the past year are some of the safest and most effective ever created.  Continue reading.

Opinion: Republicans are dismantling the right to vote. But they’ve enshrined the right to infect.

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In the United States in the year 2021, you, as an American citizen, do not necessarily have the right to vote.

You do not necessarily have the right to teach or to learn about matters of race, gender or anything else state lawmakers consider “divisive concepts.”

But you do have one absolute, sacrosanct, inviolate, God-given, self-evident and inalienable right: the right to refuse a coronavirus vaccine — and to infect as many people as you can.

With the blessing of the Roberts court, legislatures in Republican-run states are rushing to impose new voting restrictions, particularly on non-White voters. A tally by the Brennan Center finds that, as of June 21, 17 states had enacted 28 new laws restricting the ability to vote since the start of this year. Continue reading.

Top Tennessee health official says she was fired after efforts to get teens vaccinated

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“I am not a political operative, I am a physician who was, until today, charged with protecting the people of Tennessee … against preventable diseases,” Dr. Michelle Fiscus wrote.

Tennessee officials have fired the state’s top vaccination official, who had been facing scrutiny from Republican state lawmakers over her department’s outreach efforts to vaccinate teenagers against Covid-19.

Dr. Michelle Fiscus, a pediatrician, was fired Monday as the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health.

In an interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Tuesday, Fiscus said her job was to roll out the Covid-19 vaccine “across the state and to make sure that that was done equitably and in a way that any Tennessean who wanted to access that vaccine would be able to get one.” Continue reading.

Kristi Noem still brags about defying public health advice — but an expert just showed why it was a disaster

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South Dakota and Vermont are not only two very different states politically — they are also two states that have had very different COVID-19 outcomes. And Dr. Ashish Jha, a dean at the Brown University School of Public Health who is often featured as a medical expert on MSNBC, lays out some reasons for those outcomes in an op-ed published by the Washington Post this week. 

South Dakota is a deep red state with a Republican governor, Kristi Noem, who is a far-right supporter of former President Donald Trump and has been highly critical of COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing measures. Even now, she still brags about her refusal to comply with basic public health precautions:

Vermont, in contrast, is a blue state that has a Republican governor, Phil Scott, who leans conservative economically but is far from a Trump loyalist. Although Scott has policy differences with Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” he crossed party lines in the 2020 presidential election and voted for now-President Joe Biden — not Trump. And Scott has never been a coronavirus denier. Continue reading.

‘It’s devastating’: Unvaccinated woman thought she could ‘escape’ COVID-19 – now she says she’ll ‘never be the same’

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After a rough battle with COVID-19, a North Carolina woman who was unvaccinated is now urging people to get the shot, 13News reports.

“I thought I was healthy enough and that I could escape it,” said Linda Edwards, who contracted the virus about three weeks ago. “Really, it was the most frightening thing I’ve ever been through in my life.” 

“It was devastating. I had no dreams of ever staying that long. It’s the longest I’ve ever been in the hospital,” she said of her two-week hospital stay. “I was there hoping and praying my son was okay here because he had tested positive, too.” Continue reading.

On TikTok, audio gives new virality to misinformation

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The Institute for Strategic Dialogue analyzed 124 TikTok videos featuring vaccine misinformation that garnered more than 20 million views and 2 million likes, comments and shares.

In December, a Wisconsin man who goes by the username the_alpha_k9 on TikTok uploaded a testimonial-style video to the platform, telling his thousands of followers that he wouldn’t be taking a Covid-19 vaccine. 

“You’re telling me in 40 years of research there is no vaccine for HIV … for cancer, no vaccine … the common cold, no vaccine,” he said. “Yet in one year we’ve developed a vaccine for COVID-19 and you want me to take that … thanks, but no thanks.”

It was one of the many debunked, run-of-the-mill anti-vaccination talking points that have permeated many social platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic. But on TikTok, where users regularly reuse popular audio tracks to make their own videos, it took on a life of its own. More than 4,500 videos featuring the audio have been made, which have been viewed more than 16 million times, according to a report published Monday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based organization that tracks disinformation. Continue reading.

Newsmax host dangerously declares vaccines go ‘against nature’: Diseases are ‘supposed to’ wipe out people

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Newsmax host Rob Schmitt on Monday dangerously declared he believes vaccines go “against nature” and diseases are “supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes.”

Admitting he’s “not a doctor,” as Media Matters reports, Schmitt mused on-air, “I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m not a pro-vaxxer. I’m somebody that’s looking at this thing and trying to figure it out.”

“I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature, and the way everything works. And I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature,” he claimed, ignoring the fact that all medicine in theory does too – if you define evolution in the most basic “survival of the fittest” terms. Continue reading.