Tag: pandemic

CDC to encourage ‘Vaccinated for COVID-19’ buttons

If there are “I Voted” stickers, why not “Vaccinated for COVID-19” buttons?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to offer health care providers a template they can use to print buttons or stickers that would advertise a person’s vaccination status. The idea is that the button would be handed out to patients after they receive their vaccination shots.

The effort is part of a “toolkit” that the CDC plans to provide healthcare systems to “educate and promote vaccination,” a CDC spokesperson told ABC News.

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Gov’s order makes COVID vaccine registry mandatory

Governor Chris Sununu last week signed an executive order requiring everyone who receives a COVID-19 vaccine to have their immunizations registered with the state.

New Hampshire has been the only state without a vaccine registry, a list of who has received which vaccines. Though state law directed the Department of Health and Human Services to create the registry years ago, the state only began building the registry this year.

Sununu’s executive order will require health care providers to report every COVID-19 vaccine, suspending a part of the state vaccine registry law that allows patients to opt out of registering vaccines.

But the order will allow patients to have their immunization records removed from the registry after the pandemic is over.

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COVID-19 Vaccine Approved In Under a Year As Gov’t Keeps Cannabis Schedule 1 Drug

Because they work on the front lines, healthcare workers are eligible to skip to the front of the line to receive the jab of the vaccine that was developed in record time. However, despite assurances from vaccine makers and their revolving door friends in the Food and Drug Administration, many of these front line workers are leery of this rushed product.

“I think I would take the vaccine later on, but right now I am a little leery of it,” nurse Yolanda Dodson, 55, who works at the Montefiore Hospital in New York City and spent the spring in the heart of the deadly fight against the virus told AFP.

“Vaccine studies so far “look promising but I don’t think there is enough data yet,” Dodson said.

“This is a vaccine that was developed in less than a year and approved under the same administration and government agencies that allowed the virus to spread like a wildfire,” Diana Torres, a nurse at a Manhattan hospital who saw several of her co-workers die of the virus this spring, said.

“They didn’t have enough time and people to study the vaccine,” she said. “This time around I will pass and watch how it unfolds.”

“They failed miserably with PPE (personal protective equipment) and testing and now they want you to be guinea pigs for the vaccine,” Torres friend added.

These are front line health care workers, experiencing the pandemic every day of their lives, and yet they remain skeptical — and rightfully so.

What’s more, the government’s selective approval process has been less than stellar given the opioid epidemic, and the millions of people harmed by FDA-approved medications. Highlighting the lapse in their judgement is the fact that as the government fast tracks this vaccine to market, cannabis — that has never killed a single person and has been around as long as we have — remains classified as follows:

a drug with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.

Seems legit.

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$1,500 payment proposed for people who get COVID-19 vaccine

A former presidential candidate is proposing a measure that would pay people $1,500 in exchange for getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

U.S. Rep. John Delaney, D-Maryland, told CNBC the payments would be an “incentive” for those who might be reluctant to take the vaccine.

“The faster we get 75% of this country vaccinated, the faster we end COVID and the sooner everything returns to normal,” said Delaney, who ran for president in 2020. “We have to create, in my judgment, an incentive for people to really accelerate their thinking about taking the vaccine.”

Delaney said the payments wouldn’t mean the vaccine would be required for everyone.

“If you’re still afraid of the vaccine and don’t want to take it, that’s your right,” Delaney said. “You won’t participate in this program. But guess what?  You’re going to benefit anyhow, because we’ll get the country to herd immunity faster, which benefits you. So I think everyone wins.”

Delaney’s proposal would cost about $380 billion, roughly $110 billion more than the total of the stimulus payments that went out in March during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. That stimulus provided up to $2,400 for married couples and up to $1,200 for single people with an additional $500 per dependent. Despite months of negotiations, Congress has failed to agree on terms for a second COVID-19 stimulus.

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Vaccine Safety to Remain Unclear Until Millions Get Their Shots

Monitoring Covid-19 vaccines for safety issues will fall to a group of U.S. health agencies that also will have a hand in their rollout, a potential hurdle in persuading skeptics to get the shots, say former government officials who helped control an outbreak a decade ago.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs and other health agencies all have separate systems to track side effects and safety in people who get the first shots. But there are concerns the groups advising the agencies on all aspects of a vaccine may face public skepticism over their safety assessments at a time when vaccine hesitancy is a major concern.

“The same advisory committee that told them to get it are telling them it’s OK,” said Daniel Salmon, the director of vaccine safety for the National Vaccine Program Office during the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak. “What are the optics of that?”

There’s also worry that a lack of unified oversight could make it more difficult to document and quickly act on safety issues. Meanwhile, the stalled presidential transition could complicate efforts even further, said Jesse Goodman, who led the FDA office that handled vaccines during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak.

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