Tag: vaccines

The CDC’s Rules Let Teachers, Lawyers, Media Jump to the Front of the COVID Vaccine Line

Education sector “support staff members,” corporate tax lawyers, and magazine fashion editors will all jump to the front of the coronavirus vaccination line ahead of the general population, under recommendations issued in late December by the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Self-interest dictates I should probably wait until after I get my immunity-producing doses before raising any questions about the prioritization. The government’s allocation strategy is such an inviting target, though, that it’s hard to resist taking, er, a shot.

How did we get here? On December 20, a government committee of highly educated, mostly academic experts known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted about who should get the vaccine first. The committee has 15 voting members. Twelve of them are medical doctors. One is a lawyer. Nine—a majority—are affiliated with universities, including Stanford, Vanderbilt, Baylor, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Naturally, the committee of doctors decided that the first vaccines should go to healthcare workers. That might seem like common sense—emergency room or intensive care doctors treating Covid-19 patients deserve to be protected against the risk of catching the disease in the workplace. Healthcare workers, though, is a big, catchall category. It includes everyone from Beverly Hills plastic surgeons conducting elective cosmetic surgery to “administrative staff,” which might be the billing clerk in the plastic surgery practice, or some hospital accounts-receivable bookkeeper or fundraiser with no patient contact.

“Healthcare personnel” are in the CDC’s phase 1a. Educational sector support staff are next in phase 1b. That could include people who are currently working from home and who ordinarily have little or no direct contact with students—say, the employees who answer telephone questions about retired professors’ pension benefits.

The next phase, 1c, encompasses the “media” and “law” categories. Like healthcare personnel, these groups are so broad that they include essential frontline workers but also some others whose prioritization is difficult to justify.

Journalists covering the pandemic by doing on-the-scene reporting from nursing homes or hospital intensive care units probably do have a strong case to be vaccinated relatively early. So do criminal defense lawyers meeting clients in prisons or jails, or making frequent in-person courtroom appearances.

The “media” and “law” categories, though, also include the copyeditors at Vogue and the big-firm lawyers who rarely show up in court but spend their time instead writing memos and helping companies minimize their taxes. Their Covid-19 risk seems pretty small, or at least small enough that it’s hard to see the rationale for those workers leapfrogging ahead of the general population.

A cynic might suspect the vaccine committee put lawyers and journalists early in the queue as a way to avoid getting sued or attracting negative press coverage.

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Second California hospital busted for giving COVID-19 vaccine to relatives

A second California hospital has been busted for giving the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to its employees’ relatives — instead of using the doses for the elderly or frontline workers.

Southern California Hospital allowed its workers to invite relatives to get vaccinated — just as another area hospital did last week, sparking criticism.

“The hospital had planned on vaccinating all of their employees, but a large number of their staff declined and they were sitting on a lot of thawed vaccines,” a woman vaccinated at Southern California Hospital told the Orange County Register. “‘They offered police officers, firefighters and first-responders to get vaccinated and also told employees they could invite four family members.”

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We are putting woke idiocy above saving lives

After a year of the Covid pandemic, the rollout of the vaccine promises to be the light at the end of the tunnel. And while the work to develop and test the vaccines has been done successfully and at record speed, the rollout poses an enormous logistical challenge.

In the UK, retired doctors are volunteering to become Covid vaccinators to speed up the process. But the bureaucratic hurdles to volunteering are bordering on the absurd.

Retired GP Claire Barker, in a letter to the Telegraph, writes that she is expected to have documentation that she has received training in ‘conflict resolution, equality, diversity and human rights, fire safety, and preventing radicalisation’.

In other words, medically qualified doctors cannot administer a life-saving vaccine unless they have had diversity training.

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Fauci says mandatory COVID-19 vaccines possible for travel, school

Dr. Anthony Fauci said it’s possible that COVID-19 vaccines will become mandatory in order to travel to other countries or attend school.

“Everything will be on the table for discussion,” Fauci, who will be chief medical adviser to President-elect Joe Biden, told Newsweek.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases stressed that it’s “not up to me to make a decision,” but added that “these are all things that will be discussed [under the Biden administration].”

“I’m not sure [the COVID-19 vaccine] going to be mandatory from a central government standpoint, like federal government mandates,” Fauci said, though he added that he’s “sure” that some individual institutions will require the shot.

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Swiss Patient Dies Shortly After Receiving Pfizer COVID Vaccine

After an Israeli man reportedly died just 2 hours after receiving his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, authorities in the Swiss Canton of Lucerne said on Wednesday that one of the first people in the country to receive the vaccine has died, though whether his death had anything to do with the inoculation hasn’t yet been determined.

The canton has yet to release any additional details about the exact amount of time that passed between the inoculation and the man’s death.

Lucerne was the site of the first vaccinations in Switzerland beginning last week, with a shot from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech given primarily to elderly people. Switzerland has received 107K vaccine doses, so far, and expects to get 250K per month starting next year.

“We are aware of the case,” a spokesperson said, before adding that the death had been referred to Swiss drugs regulator Swissmedic. Swissmedic didn’t comment further.

Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine is the only vaccine approved, so far, in Switzerland. The EU has just started approving the jabs on an emergency-use basis, with the first injections starting earlier this week.

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Spain Plans A “Registry” For Those Who Refuse COVID Vaccine

As Europe begins vaccinating the first wave of high-priority patients, a “glitch” has already emerged: many health-care workers and others have refused to take the vaccine, as skepticism and suspicion remain elevated.

A similar phenomenon has played out in the US, but to a less intense degree. But the situation, which we discussed last night, is now one of a variety of reasons, from a shortage of supplies and raw materials, to an uncooperative populace, that public-health officials are growing worried about hitting lofty vaccination targets.

And so, in Spain at least, government bureaucrats are fighting back, as Health Minister Salvador Illa warned the country would set up a “registry” for everybody who refuses the vaccine.

“What will be done is a registry, which will be shared with our European partners… of those people who have been offered it and have simply rejected it,” he said.

“It is not a document which will be made public and it will be done with the utmost respect for data protection.”

He added that the registry would not be made public, or delivered to employers, which begs the question: why else would the government keep a database of that information?

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Moderna COVID-19 vaccine may cause side effects for those with cosmetic facial fillers: FDA

People with cosmetic facial fillers could experience swelling and inflammation with one of the coronavirus vaccines, the FDA advisory committee noted.

According to the committee, several trial participants with fillers have already experienced side effects. A California-based dermatologist said the reaction was immunological, ABC7 reported on Thursday.

“Your immune system which causes inflammation is revved up when you get a vaccine, that’s how it’s supposed to work,” said Dr. Shirley Chi, who noted the side effects were easily treated by medical personnel.

“So it makes sense that you would see an immune response in certain areas where they see some substance that is not a naturally occurring substance in your body.”

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Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Tied to UK Eugenics Movement

For instance, mainstream media has had little, if anything, to say about the role of the vaccine developers’ private company – Vaccitech – in the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership, a company whose main investors include former top Deutsche Bank executives, Silicon Valley behemoth Google and the UK government. All of them stand to profit from the vaccine alongside the vaccine’s two developers, Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert, who retain an estimated 10% stake in the company. Another overlooked point is the plan to dramatically alter the current sales model for the vaccine following the initial wave of its administration, which would see profits soar, especially if the now obvious push to make COVID-19 vaccination an annual affair for the foreseeable future is made reality.

Yet, arguably most troubling of all is the direct link of the vaccine’s lead developers to the Wellcome Trust and, in the case of Adrian Hill, the Galton Institute, two groups with longstanding ties to the UK Eugenics movement. The latter organization, named for the “father of eugenics” Francis Galton, is the re-named UK Eugenics Society, a group notorious for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to “improve racial stock” by reducing the population of those deemed inferior for over a century.

The ties of Adrian Hill to the Galton Institute should raise obvious concerns given the push to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine he developed with Gilbert the vaccine of choice for the developing world, particularly countries in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia and Africa, the very areas where the Galton Institute’s past members have called for reducing population growth.

In the final installment of this series on Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s vaccination effort, and race, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine’s ties to Eugenics-linked institutions, the secretive role of Vaccitech, and the myth of the vaccine’s sale being “non-profit” and altruistically motivated are explored in detail.

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