Coronavirus

It’s been two weeks since U.S. officials launched what ought to be the largest vaccination campaign in the nation’s history. So far, things are going poorly.

How poorly? Untold numbers of vaccine doses will expire before they can be injected into American arms, while communities around the country are reporting more corpses than their mortuaries can handle.

Operation Warp Speed has failed to come anywhere close to its original goal of vaccinating 20 million people against the coronavirus by the end of 2020. Of the 14 million vaccine doses that have been produced and delivered to hospitals and health departments across the country, just an estimated three million people have been vaccinated. The rest of the lifesaving doses, presumably, remain stored in deep freezers — where several million of them could well expire before they can be put to use.

That’s an astonishing failure — one that stands out in a year of astonishing failures. The situation is made grimmer by how familiar the underlying narrative is: Poor coordination at the federal level, combined with a lack of funding and support for state and local entities, has resulted in a string of avoidable missteps and needless delays. We have been here before, in other words. With testing. With shutdowns. With contact tracing. With genomic surveillance.

The vaccine has been billed as the solution to this crisis — an incredible feat of science that would ultimately save us from the government’s widespread incompetence. But in the end, vaccines are a lot like other public health measures. Their success depends on their implementation.

The implementation of these shots is complicated by a number of factors, including cold-storage requirements, which in turn necessitate special training for nurses and doctors. Training takes time and money, both of which are in short supply in most states. Some hospitals have said they don’t know which vaccine they are going to receive, or how many doses, or when. The federal tracking system that monitors vaccine shipments and whereabouts and the chain of communication among federal, state and local health officials have been disorganized.

In state after state, the results have been chaotic. In one Kentucky community, doses were nearly wasted when one nursing home ordered more than it needed. (Pharmacists saved the shots from the garbage bin by offering them to lucky customers on the spot.) In Palo Alto, Calif., faulty algorithms initially excluded frontline hospital residents from getting vaccinated. In New York and Boston, doctors who are at low risk have been caught cutting ahead of those at high risk. In Wisconsin, some 500 doses were deliberately wasted by a hospital employee. In Florida, seniors are waiting in line overnight in some cases.

If it’s been this difficult to vaccinate nursing home residents and health care workers — which should have been the easy part, by most accounts — one shudders to think what the picture will look like when larger, more diffuse populations become eligible for the shot.

Officials say that early stumbles are unavoidable in an effort this large and that the pace of vaccination will most likely pick up in the coming weeks, as kinks are ironed out and holidays pass. Hopefully, that’s the case. A major Covid surge — and the burden it has placed on health care facilities — has clearly made things harder than they might have been. But the chaos and confusion are widespread and concerning. The national track record on pandemic response is not reassuring.

Other countries are trying to offer the vaccine to as many people as possible. In Britain and Canada, for example, officials are planning to deploy all of their current vaccine supply immediately, rather than reserve half of it so those who get a first shot can quickly get their booster. Modeling has suggested that this approach could avert some 42 percent of symptomatic cases. Ideally, U.S. officials would at least consider similar measures. But more doses won’t make any difference if we can’t even manage the doses we have now.

Whatever the solutions are to the vaccine challenge, the root problem is clear. Officials have long prioritized medicine (in this instance, developing the coronavirus vaccines) while neglecting public health (i.e., developing programs to vaccinate people). It’s much easier to get people excited about miracle shots, produced in record time, than about a dramatic expansion of cold storage, or establishment of vaccine clinics, or adequate training of doctors and nurses. But it takes all of these to stop a pandemic.

It would be heartening if, after this wretched year, there was a decisive shift in that calculus, so that when the next pandemic descends, disease prevention — in all its glorious dullness — is given its due.

The co-founder of the German vaccine developer has spoken of the battle to ramp up production of its coronavirus jab. His comments come amid growing criticism of Europe's vaccine rollout.
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Dave Carr, an intensive care charge nurse, is one of many NHS workers desperate for the public to know what is going on inside their hospitals at a time when misinformation and scepticism about the virus are rife.

Outside St Thomas’ in the early hours of New Year’s Day, a crowd of Covid deniers gathered, without masks, shouting “Covid is a hoax”. Inside, Carr’s colleagues struggled to save the lives of a growing number of patients.

“The public needs to be aware of what’s happening. This is worse than the first wave; we have more patients than we had in the first wave and these patients are as sick as they were in the first wave. Obviously, we’ve got additional treatments that we can use now, but patients are still dying, and they will die,” said Carr.
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Carr, who has been an intensive care specialist for 21 years, said that while more lives were being saved at St Thomas’, those patients have to be in hospital for longer, leading to more pressure on hospitals, “because we can actually fix more patients than we could the first time round”.

He warned that St Thomas’ was now treating patients from other hospitals in the area that were near collapse.

Carr’s hospital has increased intensive care capacity and now has almost 100 beds, but struggles to find the nurses to staff them. He believes that the dire situation could have been avoided if hospitals had slowed non-urgent operations and care in recent months to concentrate on training nurses, but “what we heard was NHS England and the Department of Health just pressurised the hospital to do as much elective work as possible, and of course now we’ve got to deliver the vaccine.”
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It's not just here in Germany...

as an expression of my personal protest to resign from the Academy of Sciences in Mainz.
I can't reconcile with my conscience being a part of this type of science. I want to serve a science that is committed to fact-based honesty, balanced transparency, and comprehensive humanity

— Kevin McKernan (@Kevin_McKernan) January 1, 2021

Exclusive: lifesaving surgery to be postponed in capital as cases top 57,000, while other parts of UK brace for effects of Christmas Day mixing
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NHS England chiefs are considering the drastic action because hospitals across the capital are becoming overwhelmed by people who are very sick with Covid-19.

The operations likely to be cancelled, known as “priority two” procedures, mainly involve surgery for cancer where specialists have judged that the patients need to be operated on within four weeks. Any delay could allow their tumour to grow, the disease to spread or both, thus reducing their chances of survival.
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The situation has arisen because London hospitals are running out of intensive care beds and thus cannot perform types of cancer surgery that would require an ICU bed for the patient to recover in.

These operations are the second most pressing of the four categories of surgery the NHS undertakes. Priority four cases are elective procedures that can be deferred for longer than three months; priority three operations should be done within three months; and priority two should be done within 28 days. The only types deemed more urgent are emergency operations, which need to be done within 24 or 72 hours.
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It came as the UK recorded a further 57,725 cases of Covid-19, the fifth day running that the figure has topped 50,000. A further 445 deaths were also recorded on Saturday.

In another sign of the intense strain on the capital’s NHS, five hospitals on Saturday had to divert emergency patients to other hospitals because their A&E units were so overloaded.

Meanwhile, senior doctors and hospital bosses are warning that the NHS is at risk of becoming “maxed out”, with a widespread shutdown of normal care, because of the surging number of Covid cases needing hospital care.

They fear that the inter-household mixing that was allowed in some parts of the UK on Christmas Day will lead to a further rise in the already dramatic numbers of people becoming very ill.
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Hundreds of Israelis get infected with ‘Covid-19’ after receiving Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine – reports

https://www.rt.com/news/511332-israel-vaccination-coronavirus-pfizer/

it is called genocide!!!

no surprise here.

Palandre wrote:

it is called genocide!!!

The persecution of Jews is a major part of Jewish history.
To compare the Holocaust with a life saving vaccination is not only immoral but also shows your lack of empathy and character.