National Guard administering COVID vaccination in Arizona
One of the saddest elements of the Coronavirus pandemic in the United States is the elevation of false and erroneous information in the media, including but not limited to social media such as Facebook. Much of this “fake news” is critical of COVID vaccination and precautions such as mask wearing. Some of it is politically motivated, for example, by people who don’t trust any government, or by right wingers who want to hurt Democratic leaders such as President Joe Biden and various Democratic state governors, who are largely proactive in fighting the pandemic.
As a result, the media information on COVID that many people access and then discuss with their friends, family and colleagues becomes “he said/she said,” featuring falsehoods on an even level with scientific evidence and truths. In such an environment, therefore, few things are more welcome than this news article from a few days ago (and since updated) in The Miami Herald:
Not just a number.’ COVID deaths pass 700,000 in U.S. amid vaccine refusal, delta variant
What distinguishes this article is that it’s an actual news article, not an opinion or editorial piece or comment, which places the blame for the recent 700,000 U.S. COVID death milestone squarely on the folks who refuse to get a COVID vaccine. After the jump are some choice excerpts and quotes from the article:
Tens of millions of Americans have refused to get vaccinated, allowing the highly contagious delta variant to tear through the country and send the death toll from 600,000 to 700,000 in 3 1/2 months.
Florida suffered by far the most death of any state during that period, with the virus killing about 17,000 residents since the middle of June.
Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has analyzed publicly reported state data, said it’s safe to say at least 70,000 of the last 100,000 deaths were in unvaccinated people. And of those vaccinated people who died with breakthrough infections, most caught the virus from an unvaccinated person, he said.
“If we had been more effective in our vaccination, then I think it’s fair to say, we could have prevented 90% of those deaths,” since mid-June, Dowdy said.
But as the delta variant swept the country, caseloads and deaths soared — especially among the unvaccinated and younger people, with hospitals around the country reporting dramatic increases in admissions and deaths among people under 65.
But millions are either refusing [the COVID vaccine] or still on the fence because of fear, misinformation and political beliefs. Health care workers report being threatened by patients and community members who don’t believe COVID-19 is real.
Amanda Alexander, a COVID-19 ICU nurse at Georgia’s Augusta University Medical Center, said Thursday that she’d had a patient die on each of her previous three shifts.
“I’ve watched a 20-year-old die. I’ve watched 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds,” with no pre-existing conditions that would have put them at greater risk, she said. “Ninety-nine percent of our patients are unvaccinated. And it’s just so frustrating because the facts just don’t lie and we’re seeing it every day.”
The Miami Herald should be commended for being courageous enough, given the often vehement behavior from anti-vaxxers, to publish this article, and furthermore, to make it available online for free. And as indicated in the article, the news doesn’t have to be all bad when it comes to the potential role of social media in the pandemic. As to one young man from Kansas who was mentioned as having died of COVID:
“There’s just a lot of miscommunication about the vaccine,” said his wife, 27-year-old Aubrea Baker, a labor and delivery nurse, adding that her husband’s death inspired a Facebook page and at least 100 people to get vaccinated. “It’s not that we weren’t going to get it. We just hadn’t gotten it yet.”
Photo by The National Guard/Arizona National Guard, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/1hiUA9
