After yet another period of high community risk level for COVID here in Broome County, New York, we have just today returned to medium level. After a post-Thanksgiving spike in infections, we experienced a hospitalization spike which had increased our community risk level. With the US health system also dealing with an early, hard-hitting flu season and RSV, the dreaded triple-demic, in some areas hospitals are reaching capacity and sending patients to other locations. Additionally, infection rates are predicted to rise as family and friends gather for Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year celebrations in the coming weeks.
This comes at a time when only 14.1% of people five and over in the US have received the new bivalent COVID booster, which was designed to better combat the Omicron BA.4/5 variants and is proving effective against the current dominant strains, BQ1 and BQ1.1, which are part of the BA.5 lineage.
Furthermore, a recent study indicates that the US vaccination program likely saved 3.2 million lives and prevented 18.5 million COVID-related hospitalizations. The vaccines are estimated to have averted nearly 120 million infections. Another recent study shows that in the two years of COVID vaccine availability in the US, the excess death rate among Republicans is significantly higher than among Democrats, mirroring the difference in vaccination rates, a sad reflection of the politicization and misinformation around vaccines by many prominent Republicans.
It’s horrifying.
The mistrust sown over the COVID vaccine among Republicans seems to be spreading to other vaccines as well. A newly published survey finds that over 40% of Republican or Republican-leaning respondents oppose requirements for the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) for school children.
This does not bode well for public health measures. It’s frightening how many people will believe politicians or media figures rather than doctors and public health experts on these important issues. People have been infected because they weren’t up to date on vaccinations. People have been hospitalized, developed long COVID, experienced complications, or died at higher rates because they refused vaccines or boosters. The data show this.
Please, get a bivalent COVID booster if you are eligible. Begin or continue the primary vaccination series if you haven’t completed it. If you get symptoms, test immediately and contact a health professional if you test positive to see if antiviral medication is right for you. Don’t go out and expose others if you sick with COVID, flu, or anything else. Mask indoors when infection levels for COVID, flu, RSV, etc. are high in your area. Avoid crowds. Increase ventilation. Wash hands and avoid touching your face – more for flu/cold prevention than COVID. Try to eat and sleep as well as possible.
If you are someone who has been getting health information from pundits, please turn to your personal health care provider, public health department, or national health organizations, such as the CDC. Look for data and advice from public health experts, not anecdotes.
For readers outside the US, turn to your public health experts to see what measures are available and appropriate for you.
Reminder to all: COVID 19 is still a global pandemic. Act accordingly for your health, your household’s and community’s health, and global health.
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Joanne Corey 
It’s so scary out there. In Canada too. Our hospitals are filling up, especially the children’s hospitals. Just unfathomable.
Stay safe, Joanne.
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You, too, Linda. I know you must have extra concerns with your son already being medically vulnerable. We do everything we can to protect ourselves and our families but there is only so much that’s possible.
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The jabs were released too quickly.
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I disagree. They saved a lot of lives. Here in the US, a lot of suffering and death could have been prevented if the vaccines hadn’t been politicized and they had been adopted more widely. Part of the reason my county had a high transmission rate for so much longer than other parts of the state was that our vaccination rate was lower.
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Joanne Corey, they had the designation of Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and many cases of adverse, even lethal reactions were actively reported in a pannel hosted by Senator Ron Johnson.
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Respectfully, there were very few serious/lethal reactions reported with either of the major mRNA vaccines. You can see the statistics with links to data and studies here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
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Joanne Corey, here is a video for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWx7mT1AE0U&pp=ygUqU2VuYXRvciBSb24gSm9obnNvbiB2YWNjaW5lIGFkdmVyc2UgZXZlbnRz There are medical experts who would disagree with you here.
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I find the overall data and statistics much more convincing than these anecdotal stories. The vast majority of epidemiologists and public health experts follow along the lines of the data that I shared. The few that don’t who were on Johnson’s panel are the outliers.
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Joanne Corey, a hypothetical: 2 people get the Pfizer vaccine, 1 with no adverse effects and the other with a headache easily treated with aspirin. Would you be willing to dismiss the story of the adverse event just because it is one person in this case?
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It’s a data point. I would question whether a headache meets the definition of adverse effect, which is a phrase usually used for more serious reactions. It is, however, anecdotal. Taken alone, it is not elucidating about the prevalence across millions of doses.
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Joanne Corey, if the person had persistent headaches that followed the vaccines but no history of chronic migraines otherwise, would that constitute an adverse after-effect?
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Possibly. On an individual basis, you would need to look at other possible changes or causes. At a population level, you would need to compare the rate of this problem after vaccinations compared to the rate of this problem without vaccination.
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Joanne Corey, if you had a family that kept to themselves and only really interacted with people as they believed it necessary, however, they kept to themselves entirely otherwise, why should they bear the brunt of the blame for any pandemic or virus that they never contributed to spreading?
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This isn’t about blaming any particular persons for the pandemic. Public health policy tries to protect as many people as possible from illness, disability, and death. Individuals can choose whatever path they deem fit regarding their own health. Total isolation from others is a difficult path to follow but the reality is that an interaction, however necessary, can be a risk with some of the more recent variants that have become even more contagious.
One of the horrible realities in the US has been that disproportionate numbers of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have occurred in places where there was a lot of mis/disinformation about public health precautions, such as masking, vaccines, and crowd avoidance. There were even people who didn’t believe COVID-19 existed until they were hospitalized because of it. If there is blame to be assigned, it falls on those who publicized false information, not on those who believed it, too many of whom became victims.
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Joanne Corey, assuming in good faith that reports of adverse events post-Covid jabs, be they real but rare are true, who should get the reports first?
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Generally, once they are medically verified by the CDC, the reports are made public. If it is during a clinical trial, the investigators typically make their full report available from their website, as well.
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Joanne Corey, while anecdotal evidence may not necessarily be considered as hard evidence, it is still evidence. Regarding the possibility of real but rare issues post-vaccine, regardless of the vaccine, every person who reports adverse events should be given a voice. They should not be ignored by the media just to please their donors, including major pharmaceutical companies.
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There already is a public system in place to report possible vaccine side effects. https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are required to report and members of the public may file their own reports. There are instructions on how to do so on the webpage. All the reports can be accessed by the public. This page: https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html explains how to do that. The caveat is that these are reports that will show things that happened but they could be a coincidence rather than a cause/effect. For example, a person could report a heart attack the day after their flu vaccine, but they had a heart condition and were shoveling snow. What is helpful about having this kind of reporting system, though, is that it helps the public health system to identify rare side effects that didn’t turn up in clinical trials because they only occur in a handful of people per million.
There is a similar system for drug side-effects. Sometimes, warnings are added later on, such as the warning about tendon problems when taking fluoroquinolones.
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Joanne Corey, how many reports numerically should be made before they get taken seriously? 1, 000? 2, 000? More?
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I am not a public health expert but I think the threshold is much lower than that. I think that the J&J COVID vaccine got action on myocarditis with less than a dozen cases reported.
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Joanne Corey, that makes sense.
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