Perspectives: Are Covid Booster Shots Necessary?; It’s Time To Mandate Vaccines For Health Care Workers

The New York Times: Covid Vaccine Booster Shots Are Coming. Are They Needed? 
The drugmaker Pfizer recently announced that vaccinated people are likely to need a booster shot to be effectively protected against new variants of Covid-19 and that the company would apply for Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorization for the shot. Top government health officials immediately and emphatically announced that the booster isn’t needed right now — and held firm to that position even after Pfizer’s top scientist made his case and shared preliminary data with them last week. (Elisabeth Rosenthal, 7/18)

Stat: Vaxxed Or Axed: Health Care Must Mandate Vaccination For Workers 
Masks are off. Theaters and indoor dining are back. Life seems to be returning to normal. And yet the highly transmissible and maybe more deadly Delta variant is spreading quickly, accounting for half of new Covid-19 cases in the U.S. and causing surges in nearly half of all states. New studies demonstrate the effectiveness of vaccines against this new variant’s immune evasiveness properties, which pose a serious threat to partially vaccinated or unvaccinated individuals. Education and factual information haven’t gotten us even halfway to a fully vaccinated population. States have tried $1 million lotteries and other incentives. Yet just 1% of the population is becoming vaccinated every week. We need to move on to something else: employer mandates. (Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Matthew Guido and Patricia Hong, 7/14)

The Hill: COVID-19 Hospitalizations And Deaths: The Unnecessary Cost Of Vaccine Hesitancy 
In the past few days, we have seen a lot of confusing messages regarding COVID-19 vaccinations: How good are the different vaccines against the variants? Do they protect against the Delta variant? Do we need booster shots? With 48.1 percent of the U.S. population fully vaccinated (56.3 percent of the eligible population) why are we seeing an increase in cases, hospitalizations and deaths? All these are important questions that need to be answered by public health in a clear way.  In late June, the U.S. had the lowest number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths as a result of COVID-19 since the early days of the pandemic. Since then, we have witnessed an increase in all three metrics. Cases have increased over 100 percent, hospitalizations and deaths about 20 percent. (Dr. Carlos Del Rio, 7/14)

CNN: War Over Misinformation Heats Up As Covid Case Counts Rise
As the coronavirus mounts a fresh US assault, it is again tearing at the nation's political divides in a way that multiplies its own impact and makes clear in a supposed summer of freedom that the battle against the virus is far from over. President Joe Biden is locked in a showdown with Facebook over vaccine misinformation. His predecessor, Donald Trump, is now weighing in, linking his Big Lie over election fraud to Biden's management of the Covid-19 crisis in a way that could brew even more of the vaccine hesitancy that is causing thousands of Americans to become infected. (Stephen Collinson, 7/19)

The Washington Post: The U.S. Is Backsliding On Covid-19. Republicans Seem To Have Decided That’s Acceptable
n the last two weeks of June, the United States averaged between 11,250 and 13,500 new coronavirus cases per day — the lowest numbers since the virus began spreading widely across the country in early 2020. As of Saturday, it was 31,464 cases per day. With multiple vaccines widely available, this rise was entirely preventable. The backsliding is due in part to Republican politicians and right-wing commentators who have spread misinformation about the virus, as well as colleagues too scared to confront them. Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether “Republicans need to stop questioning the vaccine and start pushing it instead,” Ohio Sen. Rob Portman ducked. “The vaccines are a miracle,” he replied, before crediting former president Donald Trump for their development. (James Downie, 7/18)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Good On The UC System And City Of San Francisco. The U.S. Needs Even More Vaccine Requirements
The situation is nowhere near as dire as when hospitals were overrun and 3,100 Americans a day died in January, but so much for that short-lived sense the U.S. had turned a corner on COVID-19. Los Angeles County just required residents to resume wearing masks indoors. Chicago is restarting a travel order requiring unvaccinated travelers from Missouri and Arkansas to either quarantine for 10 days or show a negative coronavirus test. And in Tennessee, the most disturbing developments across the entire nation last week were the firing of a top state health official lobbying for greater teenage vaccinations, and even more unbelievable, reports that the state’s Department of Health would halt all adolescent vaccine outreach — for all diseases, not just COVID-19 — amid ramped-up Republican state lawmaker pressure. (7/18)

CNN: What Anti-Vaxxers Sound Like To Me 
In October last year, I prepared my two-year-old son's lunch and dropped him off at our neighborhood pre-school. As a working mother, I was forced to decide between sending him to school, where he could socialize and learn, or keeping him at home while working a full-time job as a professor at a large public university. Backed into a corner, I chose to accept the risks of Covid-19, which were considered relatively low for young children. I reviewed the school's safety protocols and consulted with my son's pediatrician and neurologist, since he has epilepsy. On that particular afternoon, I was preparing to deliver a presentation via Zoom when his school called. My son was vomiting. (Tina Sacks, 7/17)