If you’re like most Americans, the past year has been a time of fear, anxiety and often profound tedium—but also of worsening dietary habits. Take 328 million people and confine them to their homes for weeks and months on end and they’re going to start eating more and exercising less. That means, no surprise, weight gain. A study published March 22 in JAMA took a crack at determining just how many pounds the average American packed on in between February and June 2020, and came up with about 7.08 lb. (3.24 kg). Even before the pandemic began, the researchers, all from the University of California, San Francisco, were involved in a program known as the Heart eHealth Study, in which 250,000 volunteers share their blood pressure, electrocardiograms, weight and more by entering them into a phone app or connecting the phone to Bluetooth-enabled devices if they own them. There is no set frequency with which the volunteers are expected to participate, but the more often they log on and contribute their readings, the more data the researchers can collect. The goal is to learn more about the lifestyles and patterns of underlying health that lead to heart disease and how it might be possible to reverse them before trouble starts. When, in mid-March and early-April of last year, 45 states issued shelter-in-place orders, it got the research team wondering about what the sudden shift to a more sedentary lifestyle would do to eating habits and body mass. To determine this, the team selected a broadly representative sample group from their existing pool of heart health subjects: 269 people from 37 states, with a median age of 51.9 years, and close to evenly divided between men and women. Over the course of four months, from Feb. 1, 2020—before pandemic-related social restrictions began—to June 1, 2020, the investigators collected a total of 7,444 weight readings from their sample pool. Over that time, the subjects gained an average of 0.59 lb. (0.27 kg) every 10 days. That was unsurprising, to an extent, given the fact that so many Americans were forced to adapt to a much less active lifestyle. But it was especially troubling because so many of the subjects included in this study had actually been losing weight before the four month period began, says Dr. Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist, UCSF professor of medicine, and a coauthor of the study. “This means that their healthy behavior was not just interrupted, it was actually reversed.” Equally worrisome, the 250,000 people from whom the 269 were selected were by no means precisely representative of the entire population. The mere fact that they enrolled in the Heart eHealth Study and that some own the bluetooth-enabled scales, ECGs and blood pressure cuffs that help them participate means that they are surely more health-conscious than much of the rest of the population. Merely to have their data included in the new weight study, they had to step on the scale a minimum of twice in the four-month study period, something that many other people may not do for months at a time. “It might be that the general population has actually experienced more weight gain than our sample group has,” says Marcus. “It might be that this is just the tip of the iceberg.” As data from the Heart eHealth program continue to pour in, Marcus and his colleagues are keeping an eye on the 269 subjects and maintaining a record of their readings. They have not decided whether they will publish a follow-up study on their weight-gain or loss, but, says, Marcus, “It will be interesting to see what happens after all of the shelter in place orders are lifted.” from https://ift.tt/31e1Cwa Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/
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Last March, friends and neighbors began stopping Emily Smith in her town outside of Waco, Texas, with questions about the coronavirus. An epidemiologist at Baylor University, Smith knows all too well how viruses are transmitted. But as the wife of a pastor and as a woman of faith, she also holds a trusted position in her community, and she would speak to those who asked about why she personally thought social distancing was a moral choice. As the weeks wore on, the questions kept coming: “What does flatten the curve mean?” “Is it safe for my child to kick a soccer ball outside with a friend?” So she started a Facebook page and called herself the Friendly Neighbor Epidemiologist. She adopted “Love thy neighbor” as the page’s credo. Smith wrote from the perspective of a scientist but also a wife and mother. She recently explained, for example, why churches should still continue to refrain from holding in-person services even though Texas has lifted its COVID-19 restrictions. “I thought I was going to be talking to my mom and my aunt and my friends,” she says. “And my tone is still like I’m talking to my grandma. But it turned out to be a lot more people.” A year later, she has more than 76,000 followers on her Facebook page, and her blog gets 1 million to 3 million hits a week. But as her digital footprint has grown—she now has followers all over the world, including a strong contingent among evangelical mothers living in the South—so has the amount of misinformation that pops up in the comments of her posts. That, too, she tries to approach with a “Love thy neighbor” ethos. “They come in with this bunk science, and I still try to be neighborly instead of jumping all over them,” she says. It’s not always easy. When commenters suggest that wearing a mask “signals you don’t have faith in God” or that attending church in person is a must because “worshipping is worth dying for,” she will post studies showing how distancing and mask wearing can save lives. If they spread misinformation, like that European countries have banned the AstraZeneca vaccine, she explains that those countries have paused, not banned it. If they start making racist comments, she blocks them. Smith, who has two children, draws fortitude from a text chain with about 30 women, mostly moms, all with M.D.s or Ph.D.s. Among them are Katelyn Jetelina, who operates a page called Your Local Epidemiologist (181,000 followers) and the all-female team of doctors and scientists who run the page Dear Pandemic (76,000 followers). She calls them her “gal pals.” They have spent the little spare time they have during the pandemic trying to provide their communities with information about a virus that, especially in the beginning, few people understood. Now with vaccines available to Americans who meet an expanding range of eligibility requirements, they are trying to both demystify the science and debunk conspiracy theories. The gal pals are just one faction of a growing grassroots network of doctor and scientist moms who have emerged as key players in the online battle against vaccine misinformation. While some of them have larger followings than others, it’s clear that most of them are connected in some way—talk to a mom in one state and she’ll suggest someone doing similar work in another. And that work is crucial. In a February poll by Pew, 30% of Americans said they wouldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine. The reasons vary: Black Americans have historically been mistreated by the medical establishment, which has led some to mistrust the health care system. The vaccines were delivered so quickly that some people worry about their safety (despite the decades of research behind them and rigorous trials). And some, including parents who have long been the target of anti-vaccine rhetoric, have encountered enough misinformation that they believe things that just aren’t true. Unless those people change their minds, the country will struggle to reach herd immunity. While experts throughout the U.S. are trying to tackle misinformation and persuade Americans to get their shots when they become eligible, these doctor-scientist moms believe they are uniquely positioned to make the case. Not only do they have the expertise to answer medical questions and clear up misperceptions, but they can relate to the people they encounter on social media as fellow parents who also want what’s best for their families and communities. They film video Q&As and explain how the safety standards were met in the development of currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines. They interview one another to reach a wider audience through Instagram and YouTube. They warn each other about strategies that trolls may use to drag them into arguments. Many describe it as a second job, albeit one that, like the additional childcare responsibilities that also came with the pandemic, is unpaid. “If I’m tired, I will send a text to some of the gal pals and just say, ‘I need to be off social for a few days,’” Smith says. “It’s a lot of work. But the alternative is not doing anything. And people are getting sick, families are getting sick. That gives me motivation to just keep going.” Shikha Jain, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, says she was the first mom to pull her daughter, now 6, out of school when news of the coronavirus spread. “I texted all her friends’ parents and said, ‘Hey, this is coming. We’re about to shelter in place, and you should prepare for the kids to be home,’” she says. Jain, who also has twin 3-year-old sons, spent the next few weeks answering panicked texts from parents on when she thought kids might be able to return to school and whether it was safe for children to wear masks since untrue rumors had spread that masks could impact children’s lung development. Her doctor friends fielded similar questions. “We realized this information wasn’t getting to people outside the medical community,” she says. Jain and five other physicians, primarily moms who belonged to the Physician Mommies Chicago Facebook group, formed IMPACT (Illinois Medical Professionals Action Collaborative Team) in early March 2020. They made flyers to distribute at businesses and churches reminding people to wear masks. They posted easily digestible fact-vs.-myth infographics to suburban-mom Facebook pages. They booked interviews on local TV and radio stations. “As a mom, I think there is this sense that you’re in it for more than just yourself,” says Vineet Arora, a hospitalist at the University of Chicago and the CEO of IMPACT. “You’re there to protect your kids. And as an extension, you’re there to protect your community.” She compares IMPACT’s efforts to those of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America or Mothers Against Drunk Driving: “Whenever there’s been a social-justice or public-health issue that affects children’s lives, moms band together.” IMPACT established a partnership with Bump Club and Beyond, a popular Chicago-based parenting blog, to conduct Q&A sessions about the virus and vaccine. Nearly 1,800 people follow IMPACT on Facebook, and more than 117,000 follow Bump Club. “How do we repurpose these mom groups to spread good information?” asks Arora, who has a 6-year-old daughter and an infant son. “Because so many moms turn to these groups for trusted advice.” Once vaccines became available, IMPACT was inundated with questions through Bump Club. The women created infographics about how the vaccines were developed and explained the efficacy of the three that have received emergency-use authorization from the U.S. FDA. They also launched a site to help Illinois residents find nearby vaccination sites. Studies show trust in medical health professionals has eroded, but experts in misinformation say a personal touch can help. “The CDC or the World Health Organization speak to audiences in terms of statistics,” says Renée DiResta, who researches disinformation at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “They’re saying, in aggregate, ‘This is the risk.’ It’s very hard for people to relate that back to their own life. And hearing from the [Biden] White House that you should go take the vaccine is not necessarily going to be something that President Trump’s most ardent supporters are going to be particularly receptive to. This is where I think the question of who is the messenger is acutely important in this rollout.” And so moms like Smith, Jain and Arora don’t just throw out stats and studies; they share their own experiences. Some of Smith’s most popular posts center on her thought process in choosing not to attend church in person. She gets hundreds of comments from followers who either detail their own churches’ safety precautions, like holding services at a local stadium, or their disappointment at having to leave because of a lack of precautions. When Arora posted about getting the vaccine even though she was still nursing, other breast-feeding women reached out to thank her for assuaging their fear. Five scientist bloggers who call themselves the SciMoms and who have nearly 13,000 Facebook followers have been battling anti-science conspiracy theories for years through blog posts and social media blitzes that lay out the science behind everything from GMOs to the chicken-pox vaccine. They even created their own comic in which the five moms fight villains like Sue Doe Syence. “We try to write for the parent on the playground,” says Alison Bernstein, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University. They intersperse data-driven posts with what they call “SciMom Moments”—funny things their kids say. Recently, Bernstein posted that her then 7-year-old daughter observed that Groundhog Day “isn’t very scientific.” Unlike governmental bodies, the moms who have taken to Facebook and Twitter can actually engage with vaccine skeptics. “The federal government can’t respond in real time on social media,” says Bernstein. “They can’t block trolls.” Neither can her local Michigan health department, which gets spammed with misinformation when it posts about the vaccines. “The amount of conspiracy theories shared in the comments of those posts is astonishing. I think the reason people like us step in is because we can take that information, distill it down into something that can be shared and respond in a way that they’re just not able to.” Read More: TIME’s COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker There’s no one type of vaccine skeptic nor a single reason someone might be hesitant to get inoculated. Misinformation has circulated for decades. Though it was found to be fraudulent and retracted years ago, many vaccine skeptics—particularly those in the “parental choice” movement—still cite a 1998 study that purported to link vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccines) with autism. Now inconsistent monitoring of falsehoods by social media sites and a politically polarized atmosphere—in addition to genuine confusion about the COVID-19 virus—have created a perfect storm for vaccine hesitancy. The Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the 147 biggest anti-vaccine accounts on social media gained 7.8 million followers in 2020, a report that helped prompt Facebook to take down anti-vaccine posts at the end of the year. Paranoid falsehoods that Bill Gates is using vaccines to inject microchips into people or that Democrats invented COVID-19 to oust Trump from office—neither of which is true—were among the most mentioned pieces of misinformation spread in 2020, according to media-analytics company Zignal Labs. “A lot of the same networks that were active in spreading misinformation related to childhood vaccinations are now simply adding the word COVID to their content and pushing it out, with virtually the same tropes,” says DiResta. People share anti-vaccine memes for different reasons. Some have good intentions, hoping to protect their community. Others are more malicious. DiResta says anti-vaccine organizations have coordinated campaigns to spread disinformation, like activating followers to give positive reviews to an anti-vaccine movie or to retweet the messages of prominent anti-vaccine activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. At an October conference organized by the National Vaccine Information Center, a leader in the anti-vaccine movement, attendees discussed strategies to encourage skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccines, including focusing on the cases in which those who received the vaccine experienced side effects, according to the Washington Post. Smith has observed that anti-vaccine sentiment transformed from what she thought was “a fringe belief” into common parlance over the summer. Forty-four percent of white evangelical Americans, who make up a significant portion of her following, say they will not get the vaccine, according to a January Washington Post–ABC News poll. Marcella Nunez-Smith, the head of President Joe Biden’s health-equity task force, has also warned that anti-vaccine groups target Black Americans, exploiting pre-existing distrust of the system. In a February Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 34% of Black adults said they intended to “wait and see” how the vaccine affects others before deciding whether to get it, and half said they worried it had not been adequately tested for safety and effectiveness among people of their own race or ethnicity. “Our Black and brown communities suffer from years of structural and systemic racism in our health care system,” says Jain. “Those are the communities that have been hardest hit by COVID, the ones least likely to trust medical professionals telling them to get the vaccine.” Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, has been tracking the rise of agitators who defy public-health guidance around COVID-19 and says anti-vaccine campaigns target different groups with different messages: some people on the far right might see the appeal of a “Don’t tread on me” ethos, while mothers are vulnerable to “fearmongering.” While a mother may be attracted to antivaccine arguments because of concerns about side effects, “she’s drawn further down a radicalization path,” he says. “It fills her with increasing levels of paranoia and moves her from vaccine-hesitant to wanting to engage in more confrontational activities.” Not all anti-vaccine activity happens online—protesters briefly shut down Dodger Stadium, a major vaccine hub, in January—but social media tends to be where conspiracy theories flourish. Online parenting groups are frequent targets. One common myth claims that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, like the ones from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, may cause infertility. The Dear Pandemic group received so many queries on this topic that its co-founder Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Applied Population Laboratory, posted a video explicitly calling out the theory as a “scare tactic”: “I just want to call it what it is: it’s a fabrication meant to play on our emotions,” she said. In 2019, pre-COVID-19, 19.5% of children had a parent who reported being “hesitant” about childhood shots, according to a study published in Pediatrics. “If there is even a question in your mind that something you’re doing may actually hurt your child, you won’t do it,” says Jain. “I think that’s a big part of the reason why they go to those groups, and that’s a big part of the reason, as parents ourselves, we have been trying so hard to reach the parent communities with our outreach, to try to make sure that our voices are just as loud as the voices of those who are spreading this misinformation.” Still, they’re up against a powerful force. When you’re constantly bombarded with conspiracy theories, it can be hard not to absorb the messaging. “Even myself as a scientist and physician and someone who advocates for these types of things, the first time I took my daughter to get her vaccines, when she was a newborn, I had a moment of hesitancy,” says Jain. “I read all of these things that I know are not true, but if you read something enough times, it seeps into your subconscious.” (She did vaccinate her kids.) There was a point early in the pandemic when Smith took a break from her page and wondered if she should make it permanent. She had filmed a video with her kids using Hot Wheels cars to demonstrate upward slope, downward slope and what flattening the curve looks like. “It was to help moms explain to kids this is why we’re not having playdates right now, because we love our neighbors and want to protect our grandmas,” she says. Soon she started getting death threats in the mail. “In the comments, I get pictures of guns and stuff,” she says. She took down the video of her kids and discussed with her family whether she should keep posting. They decided she should. “Lives are at stake,” she says. All the women TIME spoke with said they had faced harassment. Jain was pilloried by a local radio personality for encouraging people to work from home and is regularly plagued by trolls on Twitter attacking everything from her looks to her credentials. This treatment is familiar to “most people who speak out about evidence-based things,” she says, so much so that IMPACT created a tool kit for people who are attacked on social media. “If you had asked me nine months ago, I would have been like, ‘Everybody’s a great person,’” says Smith. “I have learned to have strict rules on my page. If you’re going to make threats or say anything racist or say anything about white supremacy, I will ban you.” There’s no question gender plays a role. “I’ve got some Ph.D. guy friends on Twitter, and they’ve received some. But they haven’t received threats in their front yards like me,” she says. “I get men a lot, but also 20- or 30-something moms in the South. The men are more like, ‘You need to be put in your place.’ The moms accuse me of being too preachy and not loving my children.” Read More: These Mothers Wanted to Care for Their Kids and Keep Their Jobs. Now They’re Suing After Being Fired Still, the women say they remain committed to the cause. While some dads have joined their ranks, mothers continue to lead the charge. “I think, naturally, a lot of us are helpers,” Smith says. “I think that a lot of us are really good under pressure.” She joked that if there were a list of the 100 most influential people of the pandemic, it would be made up of 99 women and Anthony Fauci. Exactly how influential is tough to determine. Facebook’s privacy restrictions make it difficult for researchers like DiResta to trace people’s activity online, and it’s not easy to prove that someone read about a doctor in their community getting a vaccine and then signed up to get one themselves. The mothers largely watch for which posts get the most likes and which questions pop up repeatedly, and then pivot with their audience’s needs. They’re bolstered by the occasional report that a woman persuaded her elderly mother to get vaccinated. Their goal seems to be simply to reach as many open-minded people as possible. When someone has dug in, there’s not much they can do but thank them for coming to their page. But Arora notes that there can be an important “bystander effect.” She’s had people reach out to thank her for correcting misinformation even if she wasn’t engaging with them directly. “Maybe they didn’t want to go public in this polarized time,” she says. “They chose to stay quiet on that, but they still are being influenced.” On March 11, Biden directed states to make all adult Americans eligible for vaccination by May 1 and suggested that on July 4 the U.S. might begin to “mark our independence from this virus.” It was a hopeful moment in a year marked by despair, but even with an end to the pandemic in sight, the mothers doing this work know they’ll be at it for a while. Fauci has said he expects vaccines to be available for teens in the fall, but kids under 12 are unlikely to be eligible until 2022. Experts have expressed concern that parents won’t be particularly motivated to vaccinate kids against COVID-19 since children, on average, are far less likely to get very ill or die from the virus. If the anti-vaccine movement pushes misinformation on hesitant parents, Smith says—and she thinks it will—“it will not only affect COVID, but it will affect measles and mumps and rubella.” Biden announced a plan in February to mobilize local ambassadors to persuade the vaccine-hesitant to opt in, and his team has begun meeting with local leaders. Bernstein says she and her fellow moms, already fighting for science online, would be happy to help. “There’s already an informal network,” she says. “Just bring us all together in some sort of organized way. I’d volunteer.” —With reporting by Simmone Shah This appears in the March 29, 2021 issue of TIME. from https://ift.tt/3tT3UwO Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Andrea Norred wasn’t too surprised to learn that many of her friends, as well as her 18-year-old son, have decided not to get vaccinated against COVID-19. She lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., a coastal city with an above-average rate of vaccine skepticism. Norred attributes that phenomenon to the area’s “hippie, free love” vibe; in many such communities, faith in natural or holistic medicine correlates with mistrust of vaccines, quite possibly to dangerous effects. Norred, 42, tries to be accepting of that choice, but it’s difficult. Herd immunity is particularly important for Norred; she has an immune deficiency that both puts her at high risk of severe COVID-19 and reduces vaccines’ effectiveness in her body. She has been hunkered down in isolation for the last year and says she won’t feel safe spending time around unvaccinated people while COVID-19 continues to spread. So for Norred, each unvaccinated friend is, at least temporarily, a friend lost. “I don’t know that things will ever be the same for me, socially, as long as COVID is around,” she says. The situation with her son is particularly painful. All she wants to do is give him a hug, but she doesn’t know when that will be possible again. Norred’s situation is particularly high stakes, but she’s not alone. For a year, the pandemic has uprooted countless social lives, shrinking them to fit inside our devices. For some, vaccination is starting to change that. Fully vaccinated people now have the CDC’s stamp of approval to hang out inside and maskless with a few vaccinated friends, or to visit with unvaccinated-but-healthy loved ones, one household at a time. But as of March 23, only about 13.5% of people in the U.S. were fully vaccinated. And this semi-protected phase is fraught. With some people vaccinated but most not—by choice or otherwise—relationships of all kinds are under strain. Some people, like Norred, are forced to choose between safety and social support; others are developing vaccine envy as they watch people around them get immunized; and still others are shaping their social events around attendees’ vaccination statuses. The result is a social code in flux. COVID-19 vaccines are the key to someday returning to a version of our pre-pandemic lives. But during the strange limbo of vaccine rollout, they are causing a whole new set of social dilemmas. Tom Zohar, 36, didn’t fully appreciate how many of his friends were educators until he watched them get vaccinated before him, one by one. “Every time I see anyone get vaccinated, I get really happy,” says Zohar, who lives in California and works in tech support. “But it is kind of this feeling of, ‘What about me? When do I get it? When is it my turn?'” (Zohar has since received his first dose.) As more people get vaccinated, allowing them to take small steps toward normality, it’s only natural for the unprotected to feel impatient, even left out. In a March TIME/Harris Poll survey, about 60% of respondents listed a desire to see friends and family again as a motivator for getting vaccinated. After months of separation, it’s only human to be eager to reunite with loved ones. And, more and more, people are basing their social calendars around their friends and families’ vaccination statuses. For those who aren’t vaccinated, FOMO is increasingly a motivator for trying to get a shot. Take weddings, for example. In an informal social media poll conducted in March by David’s Bridal, almost 20% of engaged couples said they will make their weddings vaccine-mandatory for guests. In a similar poll conducted in December 2020 by bridal brand Birdy Grey, about 35% said they planned to do so. Sukhmanii Kahlon, a 28-year-old clinical research coordinator and medical student living in Seattle, says she and her doctor fiancé knew right away they’d make their wedding vaccine-mandatory, after postponing it from June 2020 to 2022. The couple will ask each guest to include their vaccination status with their RSVP, she says. “Being medical professionals, we have to do everything we can to keep everyone safe,” Kahlon says. She’s realistic about the fact that such a policy could ruffle feathers—she has a few friends and relatives who have chosen not to get vaccinated—but she views it as non-negotiable. “I am sure it will shorten the guest list,” Kahlon says, “but it will also ensure a safer wedding for everyone attending.” Dating apps have also tracked major increases in the number of people mentioning the word “vaccine” in their profiles—a sign that many singles are choosing potential partners based at least in part on their immunity status. That’s a logical enough choice, since vaccinated people can safely meet in person and without masks, but it’s also throwing a wrench in the typical, surface-level flirting that takes place on these apps. Natalie, a 26-year-old living in Ohio who asked to be identified by first name only for privacy reasons, discovered that firsthand when she recently logged into the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. A pop-up message filled her screen, asking her to disclose whether she had been vaccinated against COVID-19. (As of mid-March, she’d gotten one dose and was awaiting her second.) While she was surprised to see the app asking for that information, Natalie says she probably wouldn’t date anyone unvaccinated. Natalie has been cautious throughout the pandemic. She’s desperate to visit her father, who is vaccinated, but is waiting to make the trip, since her stepmother isn’t vaccinated and she hasn’t gotten her own second dose. Compared to that sacrifice, she says, it’s an easy choice to limit her dating pool to vaccinated people. “We’re either just going to keep talking back and forth on [the app] until you get vaccinated, or I’m just going to say, ‘See ya,'” Natalie says with a laugh. Not everyone is on board with that trend. Christopher Eithun, who is 31 and lives in Wisconsin, says he finds it “off-putting” when someone lists their vaccination status in a dating profile. He finds it tonally odd, and says it feels like another hoop to jump through on the way to finding love. “There are enough hurdles as it is,” he says. Eithun says he’ll get his shots once he’s eligible. In the meantime, though, he’s found it frustrating to be penalized for something out of his control. “Some people don’t have access to them,” he says. It would be one thing to implement a vaccine-mandatory policy once COVID-19 shots are as prevalent as flu shots, Eithun says, but he finds it deflating to do so now, when even most people who want to be vaccinated aren’t. Access isn’t always the problem, though. As of February 2021, about 30% of Americans said they probably or definitely would not get a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Pew Research Center. In many cases, that vaccine hesitancy leaves their relatives and friends with a difficult choice to make. Zohar, the 36-year-old from California, is grappling with that situation right now, after his father announced that he did not intend to get the shot. “If he chooses not to get vaccinated, I don’t think I’m going to see him unless things improve drastically, to the point that we don’t really have to worry about [COVID-19] anymore,” Zohar says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.” Given her immune deficiency, and the number of her friends who are opposed to the shot, Norred is in an even more precarious position. She says she feels helpless as she watches life inch back toward normal for other people, while she remains quarantined inside with her two cats. “Everyone’s going to get put back together and I’m going to be sitting here, haggard in my cave,” she says light-heartedly. She grows more serious as she considers the fact that she might have to make new, vaccinated friends, just to regain a social circle. “We’re all just trying to get through each day,” Norred says. “For me, personally, that means moving forward in the world as safely as possible, and having people around me that are vaccinated.” Her dilemma likely sounds familiar to many people, even those without the added challenge of a chronic health condition. In a March poll from Axios/Ipsos, about 30% of respondents said they won’t return to in-person gatherings until their whole social circle is vaccinated. But what if key members of one’s circle never get vaccinated? There’s no roadmap for what happens then. “People are looking at vaccination from a standpoint of, ‘It protects me,’” Norred says, but some don’t seem to realize that their choices also affect others. “It’s not over for anyone,” she says, “until it’s over for everyone.” from https://ift.tt/3d0D3Iz Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ In an unusual move, on March 23 the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) issued a strongly worded statement asking AstraZeneca to “ensure the most accurate, up-to-date efficacy data be made public as quickly as possible.” On March 22, AstraZeneca released the results of its long-awaited U.S. trial of its COVID-19 vaccine, developed with scientists from Oxford University’s Jenner Institute. The data showed that the two-dose vaccine was 79% efficacious in protecting people from symptoms of COVID-19, and 100% efficacious in protecting against severe disease. That data, however, may not have included the most updated information that the independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB), which reviews U.S. vaccine studies, had shared with the company. U.S. trials of COVID-19 vaccines are conducted under randomized, double blind conditions, which means neither the doctors and staff running the trials nor the participants volunteering in them know whether they are receiving the actual vaccine being tested, or a placebo. Only the DSMB has the authority to unblind the data to determine both efficacy and reveal any safety concerns. The DSMB does periodic unblinding checks to see, for example, if side effects are occurring at higher rates in the vaccinated versus placebo groups. The DSMB also determines if enough cases of COVID-19 have accumulated to provide the statistical power necessary to determine whether a vaccine works. In all of the U.S. COVID-19 vaccine trials, the same DSMB, made up of about a dozen independent experts, is overseeing data from different vaccine makers, to ensure that the same standards are being used to review the data and that the final results are consistent. During the evening on March 22, the DSMB grew concerned by the data included in AstraZeneca’s press release, covered extensively by the media, reporting the study results. The board wrote letters to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, who serves as the U.S. government representative for the vaccine trials, as well as the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which helped to fund the trial, and AstraZeneca expressing its concern that the company chose to include only older data in its release, which “may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data,” NIAID said in a statement. “The more recent data did not make the data look as good—it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good,” says Fauci. “What concerned the DSMB was that at the time the press release went out, the DSMB knew the company had more recent data, and they chose to report the earlier data which made the data look a little better, that’s what the DSMB is saying.” In a statement responding to the DSMB’s concern, AstraZeneca said it would “immediately engage with the independent data safety monitoring board (DSMB) to share our primary analysis with the most up to date efficacy data. We intend to issue results of the primary analysis within 48 hours.” This is only the latest bump on AstraZeneca’s road to an authorized vaccine in the U.S.. After small numbers of unusual, serious illnesses were reported among study volunteers, the trial was halted in the U.S. and elsewhere last fall; the study was delayed by a month while regulators reviewed the report in the U.S. After the vaccine was authorized in the U.K. and the European Union, concerns about blood clots among people who have been vaccinated emerged in mid-March, prompting a number of countries to halt using the shot until the European Medicines Agency reviewed those cases and determined on March 18 that the benefits of the vaccine still outweighed any risk. AstraZeneca’s U.S. trial also showed that the rate of blood clots among people in the study weren’t any higher than would be expected in that population even if they hadn’t been vaccinated. In another blow to the vaccine, on March 16 South African researchers reported in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that the two-dose regimen was only about 10% efficacious in protecting people from COVID-19 if they were infected with a new variant of the virus known as B.1.351, which was first reported in South Africa and starting to account for more cases around the world. The company’s decision to report the “outdated” data could further erode confidence in the vaccine, says Fauci. “I look upon this as an unforced error, really,” he says. “There was no need for this to happen.” It could also raise questions for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists who will review AstraZeneca’s request for emergency use authorization, which the company plans to submit in coming weeks. “At the end of the day, the FDA gets all the data and they do a completely independent analysis of all the data,”’ says Fauci. “No matter what went on ahead of time, at the end of the day, the truth will come out.” AstraZeneca has committed to providing 3 billion doses of its vaccine by the end of 2021, much of it through COVAX, the global vaccine initiative that is procuring and distributing vaccines to lower resource countries. from https://ift.tt/2NJcQ8K Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ AstraZeneca May Have Used Outdated Information in Its Vaccine Trial U.S. Health Officials Say3/23/2021 WASHINGTON — Results from a U.S. trial of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine may have used “outdated information,” U.S. federal health officials said early Tuesday. The Data and Safety Monitoring Board said in a statement that it was concerned that AstraZeneca may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data. AstraZeneca reported Monday that its COVID-19 vaccine provided strong protection among adults of all ages in a long-anticipated U.S. study, a finding that could help rebuild public confidence in the shot around the world and move it a step closer to clearance in the U.S. In the study of 30,000 people, the vaccine was 79% effective at preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19 — including in older adults. There were no severe illnesses or hospitalizations among vaccinated volunteers, compared with five such cases in participants who received dummy shots — a small number, but consistent with findings from Britain and other countries that the vaccine protects against the worst of the disease. AstraZeneca also said the study’s independent safety monitors found no serious side effects, including no increased risk of rare blood clots like those identified in Europe, a scare that led numerous countries to briefly suspend vaccinations last week. The company aims to file an application with the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks, and the government’s outside advisers will publicly debate the evidence before the agency makes a decision. Authorization and guidelines for use of the vaccine in the United States will be determined by the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after thorough review of the data by independent advisory committees. from https://ift.tt/2PgNvUe Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ AstraZeneca announced the long-awaited results of the U.S. and South American study of its COVID-19 vaccine, and it was the first bit of positive news about the shot in recent weeks, after a parade of countries halted its use due to reports of blood clot complications. In the Phase 3 study involving more than 32,000 people, AstraZeneca found that its vaccine was 79% efficacious in protecting against symptoms of COVID-19. In the trial, the two-dose shot—developed by the British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical company in conjunction with Oxford University—was also 100% efficacious in protecting people from severe symptoms and hospitalization from the disease. Those results differ slightly from the company’s earlier late-stage human trial, released in February, which was conducted in the U.K., U.S., South Africa, and Brazil. In that study, the overall efficacy of the vaccine was 66%. In part, that difference might be due to the fact that more of the people in that earlier study were likely exposed and infected with new, mutant versions of SARS-CoV-2, particularly one first discovered in South Africa—against which the vaccine provides slightly less protection—compared to those in the U.S., Chile and Peru, where the later trial took place. Still, those earlier findings indicate an effective vaccine, and led many countries, as well as the European Union and the World Health Organization, to authorize its use. Then, in mid-March, reports of blood clots emerged, and many of these countries decided to suspend vaccination with the AstraZeneca regimen while they investigated the reports. On March 18, the European Medicines Agency determined after reviewing the cases that there was no increased risk of clotting or other related issues due to the vaccine, but said it would continue to monitor vaccinated people for any side effects. In the new, U.S.-based study, the data safety monitoring board also found no increased risk of blood clots among people who were vaccinated compared to those who were given placebo. “This study puts to bed any doubts that this isn’t a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19 disease and COVID-19 symptoms,” says Mene Pangalos, executive vice president for biopharmaceuticals research and development at AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca’s vaccine is based on technology developed by scientists at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, and involves using a chimpanzee adenovirus modified so it cannot cause the cold infection it normally does. The chimp virus acts as a vehicle to deliver genes into the body, where it encodes the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein; cells then process the protein so the immune system can recognize it as foreign and mount a strong response against it. The decisions by countries to halt vaccination with the AstraZeneca shot were likely “premature,” says Dr. Ann Falsey, professor of medicine at the University of Rochester and one of the coordinating investigators of the U.S. trial. The latest study bears that out, since it revealed no increased risk for blood clotting issues among people who were vaccinated than would normally occur even without the shot. Nevertheless, the reports of blood clotting and the choices of European countries to stop using the vaccine will likely factor into discussions about the safety of the shot when AstraZeneca submits its request for emergency-use authorization to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in what Pangalos expects will be “a very small number of weeks.” In the public’s view, the difference in efficacy data between the newer U.S.-based and the older U.K.-based studies might only add to confusion over understanding how safe and effective the AstraZeneca vaccine is. “That is the challenge of looking at different trials with different populations in different age groups and with different endpoints,” says Pangalos. “That’s why we [at AstraZeneca] have always said that inter-trial comparison is difficult and dangerous.” The U.K.-based trial, for example, included different dosing regimens, with some people getting the planned two full doses, about a month apart, while some received a half dose and then a full dose due to a dosing mistake. Some people in that study also received their second dose up to three months after the first. The U.S. study was more consistent. “Having a well designed and consistent protocol with consistent dosing intervals is enormously helpful,” says Falsey, who is hopeful the results will allay concerns about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy. How well the vaccine protects against the new variants of SARS-CoV-2, however, remains unclear. In a disappointing study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on March 16, researchers in South Africa found that the AstraZeneca vaccine was only about 10% efficacious against the mutated virus circulating there, following other reports that the vaccine generated lower levels of virus-fighting antibodies against the South African variant. In fact, variants may explain the difference in efficacy between the U.K.- and U.S.-based studies. The U.S.-based study began in September, and involved people in the U.S., Chile and Peru, where mutated versions of SARS-CoV-2 haven’t been dominant. The U.K.-based study, on the other hand, included people in the three countries where new variants have quickly taken over new infections—in the U.K., South Africa and Brazil—as well as in the U.S.. While the overall efficacy of the vaccine in the U.K.-based study was 66%, when the scientists looked specifically at different countries in that study, they found that in the U.S., where the variants hadn’t spread widely yet, the efficacy was 72% (close to overall 79% found in the more recent study), while in South Africa, where the new variant is relatively common, the efficacy was 47%. Pangalos notes that the vaccine’s efficacy may improve the longer people wait between doses; the U.K. study found that levels of virus-fighting antibodies were higher among people who got their second dose up to three months after the first, compared to those getting it a month later. That’s why, he says, the company will provide FDA with data from a subset of that study who were vaccinated 12 weeks apart, as well as real-world data on people in Europe who have also been vaccinated 12 weeks apart, all showing that the immune responses are stronger then. In any case, Pangalos says, the data on those received two doses a month apart is “perfectly good enough” for the public to feel confident about the shots. These results should reassure nations that have been relying on the 3 billion doses of the vaccine that the company committed to providing by the end of 2021. That includes doses manufactured for COVAX, the global vaccine procurement program that provides COVID-19 vaccines for more than 100 lower resource countries at reduced or no cost. Unlike the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, AstraZeneca’s shot can be shipped and stored at refrigerated temperatures, which makes it easier for countries with less robust infrastructure to manage. Pangalos said the company is ready to provide 30 million doses to the U.S. immediately upon receiving emergency use authorization, and another 50 million within a month after that. from https://ift.tt/3f8DbZ8 Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Plenty of drama in Europe this past week as the AstraZeneca vaccine—a crucial component of the continent’s vaccination plans—was paused by more than a dozen European countries after a few reports emerged of blood clots in people after receiving the vaccine. Europe’s FDA equivalent, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), says that it is still “safe and effective” and “its benefits… outweigh the possible risks,” even if they are unable to completely rule out a link between the vaccine and a very rare clotting disorder. But it’s the vaccine politics that are the problem now, and no EMA ruling can overcome that. That will have ramifications for both Europe’s vaccination drive… and the rest of the world’s. Why It Matters: It is no secret that Europe’s stumbling vaccination efforts leave much to be desired. Even before this week’s headlines, Europe was struggling to procure enough vaccines to jab Europeans at a quick enough clip to avoid a third pandemic wave, while Paris and parts of France lockdown again this past weekend. While AstraZeneca was an important component of Europe’s vaccination plans, it was not the be-all or end-all of those efforts—the efficacy rates were lower than its mRNA competitors like Pfizer and Moderna for the shots to be many people’s first choice, exacerbated by the fact that disparate clinical trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine were conducted in such a way as to elicit a fair amount of criticism. Recent studies have also shown that AstraZeneca is less effective than other vaccines against the new variants of the virus. But the European Union—which had leaned on member states to let Brussels lead vaccine procurement lest individual countries began competing for vaccine supplies—made a big bet on AstraZeneca. And as the EMA just confirmed again, the shot is indeed effective. Of course, Europe’s big bet on AstraZeneca came before AstraZeneca informed Brussels that it would be unable to meet its promised delivery targets of 270 million doses in the first six months of 2021, and would be delivering closer to 100 million over that same time horizon. Then reports began to surface of blood clots being found in people who had been administered the vaccine. Statistically speaking, when vaccinating so many people so quickly, problems like this are bound to crop up—people break their leg after receiving AstraZeneca too, but it doesn’t mean that there’s a causal link—and the incidence of blood clots among the 11 million people that have gotten the AstraZeneca shot in the U.K. was not any higher than in the broader population. But vaccine politics in the midst of a pandemic are particularly sensitive and some countries paused AstraZeneca out of an abundance of caution in order not to further undermine confidence of the vaccine. Which is ironic, because other countries then followed suit… which in turn undermined confidence of the vaccine. On the other hand, once the reports surfaced, doing nothing risked undermining confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine just as much, if not more. And now there’s no going back. What Happens Next: The result has been a crisis of confidence. That means a slowdown of Europe’s vaccine rollout; even if countries resume vaccinating with AstraZeneca immediately, the headlines has likely increased vaccine hesitancy even further, not just of AstraZeneca but for others as well. That’s because when it comes to vaccines—any vaccine—100% certainty is never on the table. Up until now, the world had managed to avoid any alarming vaccine news seizing headlines. It’s one thing for people to prefer one vaccine to another, another for one to be actively feared. And Europe has little choice but to wade back into the AstraZeneca vaccine waters given their lack of other options at present. And the fallout goes beyond just the vaccines themselves. The EMA, which has approved the AstraZeneca vaccine and confirmed it as safe prior to this week’s developments, is stuck. Given that the blood clot fears cropped up just on anecdotal evidence, skepticism of the vaccine is likely to persist no matter what scientists say and likely to deepen with the inevitability of more such instances coming to the fore. With each additional headline, the institution’s reputation is dinged again—rightly or wrongly. That’s a bad place to be in the midst of a pandemic. It also doesn’t help bolster confidence in the E.U. as a bureaucratic institution—for years, the technocrats in Brussels were regarded as slow and plodding, but competent. The longer the bloc struggles with the vaccine rollout, the more seriously the E.U.’s competency gets called into question, even if individual member states themselves deserve blame for holding up the rollouts as they fought over quantities and pricing. Given all that, Brussels is in damage-control (again), and the early signs point to vaccine nationalism as the answer Brussels is grasping at. For all their struggles with vaccine rollout, Europe had been good about allowing vaccines to leave its shores even while it itself struggled with getting jabs in arms, sending out more than 40 million vaccines abroad. High-profile snubs of countries like Australia aside, Europe’s vaccine generosity has been especially pronounced compared to countries like the U.S., where there was virtually no vaccine exports slated before the summer (though the U.S. has recently taken the criticism to heart and agreed to send some AstraZeneca vaccines to Mexico and Canada). That’s also true compared to the UK, which despite having no formal export ban has secured priority delivery from AstraZeneca as part of its contract, one reason for the repeated surprise cuts to the E.U. supply (in addition to the manufacturing delays in European plants), which now run into the tens of millions of doses that have failed to arrive since the start of the year. In contrast, 10 million doses sent to the U.K. came from the E.U. Decreasing interest in the AstraZeneca vaccine could increase pressure on the E.U. to restrict more exports on its other vaccines as well: A lot of vaccines—Pfizer, J&J, Novavax, and others—are and will be produced in large quantities in E.U. countries. Put another way, vaccine nationalism out of Europe has serious impact on the global vaccination picture. This week’s headlines make it seem as if AstraZeneca is just a problem for Europe. If only. One Thing to Say About It at a Dinner Party: Multiple other countries have also suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine based off of this news from Europe. Delaying the vaccine rollout globally means thousands more lives and livelihoods lost, not to mention billions of dollars for the global economy. It also means the inequality of the pandemic recovery process grows larger. If you were worried about AstraZeneca’s impact on inequality when it was just a vaccine with a lower efficacy rate being shipped to developing countries, combine that with stories floating about how not only do these vaccines not work as well, but possibly cause active harm… stories which are now harder to dismiss. Not good. Another Thing to Say About It: If we trust the science—and we should—this week’s AstraZeneca developments are just a combination of bad luck + early errors + a fatigued population verging on paranoia + Twitter + Russia vaccine disinformation on vaccines generally. In other words, the pandemic has intertwined politics and science like never before in the 21st century. Sorry. from https://ift.tt/3r8U6gw Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ LONDON — AstraZeneca says advanced trial data from a U.S. study on its COVID vaccine shows it is 79% effective. The U.S. study comprised 30,000 volunteers, 20,000 of whom were given the vaccine while the rest got dummy shots. The results were announced Monday. The early findings from the U.S. study are just one set of information AstraZeneca must submit to the Food and Drug Administration. An FDA advisory committee will publicly debate the evidence behind the shots before the agency decides whether to allow emergency use of the vaccine. While the AstraZeneca vaccine has been authorized in more than 50 countries worldwide, scientists have been awaiting results of the U.S. study in hopes it will clear up some of the confusion about just how well the shots really work. from https://ift.tt/3c8Tbso Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ I hesitated to write about the tragic events of the last few days and the swell of racist attacks on Asian Americans over the last year. Being biracial, maybe I’m not Asian enough. Why would people want to hear what I have to say? I’m not a writer. I should do what I always do – stay in the background, create platforms to uplift others, keep my head down, but how Asian is that?! I’m fighting decades of ingrained impulses to write this, but here goes. Both of my daughters had birthdays this week. One turned eleven, the other seven. I’ve been focused on ordering cupcakes, prepping for a zoom party, and thinking of all the ways I can make their days extra special after a long, strange year. <strong>Everything felt extra hard—like I was slogging through a swamp with an invisible weight on my back.</strong> But I didn’t have time to stop and think about the heaviness or the dark clouds overhead. I needed to deliver Birthday Happiness for my girls! Now that the parties are over, I recognize that weight as sadness for our country, for fellow Asian Americans, for my daughters. What does it mean to grow up as an Asian-American woman now? How do I teach my girls to be strong and bold and proud when Asian-fetishizing misogynists or white supremacists could gun them down just because they are having a bad day? When our elders are getting pushed and punched on the street just for being Asian? How can I protect them? How can they protect themselves? But even as I wonder how I’m going to save my daughters, I’m starting to realize that it is my girls and their generation who will save me, save us. They are growing up amid a cultural awakening that will disrupt the toxic norms of the past before they sink too deeply into my girls’ subconsciousness. Their generation is the most diverse in U.S. history. They are coming into this with their eyes wide open. My children recognize discrimination and racism for what it is and are learning to speak out. I am both teaching and learning from them, and they embolden me to be better and do better. My oldest daughter defines herself as an activist. For her birthday, she organized a beach cleanup and fundraiser for the Environmental Defense Fund. This is so far from my consciousness at her age. <strong>Our life in the Bay Area, where identity politics and social activism are the norm, is so unlike the small Midwestern town where I grew up in the 80s</strong>. I was trained at a young age to keep my head down, to fit in. This meant not inviting friends over when my mom made kimchee, and the house smelled of fermentation, laughing when my high school boyfriend called me ‘ornamental’ and just rolling my eyes when a college friend set ‘the Oriental riff’ as my ringtone on her phone. Is it enough of an excuse that it was a different time and place? They meant no malice, and I am still friends with these people. We are all learning as the world changes around us, as all of the fear and darkness and hate that has been hiding under the surface comes to stare us in the face. We realize we can no longer laugh it off; we have to confront it head-on. That college friend is now a much more outspoken racial justice advocate than I am. And I watch in awe as so many other friends and colleagues speak, organize, and rally for our community. I’m also so thankful for the inspiration and solace I am finding in art and artists. I watched this beautiful animated meditation by Jess X Snow over and over again. I learned about this gorgeous poster series by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. I revisited Christine Wong Yap’s recent project in S.F. Chinatown and asked myself, How do I keep my heart open? It’s not easy to stay open and hopeful in the face of hatred and tragedy. But I will pick myself up day after day and keep fighting. I’ll continue to carry this invisible weight in hopes that we can lighten the load for my kids and our collective future. Ellen Oh is an arts program director, mother, and Midwest-transplant living in the Bay Area. She has worked in the arts & social justice space for years but is still learning to find her voice. Read more in TIME: A Love Letter to Asian Americans If you’re new to It’s Not Just You, SUBSCRIBE HERE. And write to me any time: [email protected]. COPING KIT ⛱PLEASE STAY Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation teamed up with the suicide prevention organization Find Your Anchor to create the Please Stay Pledge, asking people “to stay alive even when the world seems to stop spinning”, while reminding them that they’re loved, needed, and not alone in their struggle. The project was created in response to a troubling spike in rates of depression, suicide, and anxiety disorders among young people in 2020. HOW TO REDUCE MENTAL CLUTTER Physical clutter is the most obvious issue, but we’re also burdened by emotional, energetic, and relationship clutter, writes Peggy Fitzsimmons in this guide to clearing your mind. I got a sneak peek at Making the Day, a sweet, diverting comedy premiering this month at Cinequest Film Festival. It’s a little like a Christopher Guest mockumentary about making a documentary, but with more heart than satire. It features a high-low array of characters you’d meet only if you were trying to make an underfunded film in New York. The lead, played by Juliette Bennett, is a joyfully manic actress who, after years of “Zombie #3” parts, believes this is her breakout moment. She just wants a chance to be seen. And after this long, claustrophobic winter, we can all relate. EVIDENCE OF HUMAN KINDNESS ❤️Here’s your weekly reminder that creating a community of generosity elevates us all.
The note of gratitude above is from Neil, a senior citizen in Reno, Nevada, to his local chapter of Pandemic of Love and its founder Patty Evans. In early March, the group crowdfunded $1400 in 24 hours to help Neil and his wife Cathie (pictured above) pay tow-lot fees. The couple let their car registration lapse because money was tight, and they’ve been homebound during the pandemic. They were stunned when their only car was towed from their driveway as a result. Neil has since become a POL volunteer. This story is courtesy of Shelly Tygielski, founder of Pandemic of Love, a grassroots organization that matches those who want to become donors or volunteers directly with those who’ve asked for help with essential needs. COMFORT CREATURES ? ?from https://ift.tt/3s23Ev7 Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Now that nearly 60% of Israel’s roughly 9 million residents have gotten at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, the New Jersey-sized Middle Eastern country is offering the rest of the world an enviable glimpse of a future where most people are inoculated against the coronavirus. While it’s still too early to tell the full extent to which vaccination is having an effect there, Israel’s rate of virus-related deaths has dropped faster than global figures since it started vaccinating (see chart below and methodology at bottom). Meanwhile, the latest real-world evidence collected in Israel suggests the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine—the country’s most commonly administered shot—is preventing nearly 99% of deaths from COVID-19, while also curbing viral spread. Israel’s mass vaccination efforts got off to an impressive start, with more than 10% of the population receiving their first dose fewer than two weeks into the national vaccination campaign. By comparison, it took the U.S. 57 days to reach the same mark, the U.K. 45 days, and the European Union still hasn’t matched it. Today, Israel is the worldwide leader in vaccinations per capita, at 108 doses administered for every 100 people, per the New York Times (the Pfizer vaccine requires two doses). But Israel’s breakneck rollout is beginning to slow, according to data from the Israeli Ministry of Health. While the country was administering first doses to as much as 1.5% of its population every day in early January, it’s now distributing fewer than 0.2% of initial doses daily. That’s a problem, as Israel remains short of the 70% mark that public health experts say is the minimum required level for mass vaccination to turn the tide against the pandemic in a given country. A closer look at the data reveals that not everyone in Israel has benefited equally from the vaccine rollout. Only 67% of Arab-Israelis and 70% of Israeli Haredi Jews (a group sometimes referred to as “ultra-Orthodox” Jews) over 16 were vaccinated or had recovered from COVID-19 as of March 4, compared to 90% of the rest of the population, according to data shared by Weizmann Institute computational biologist Eran Segal. However, Israel has recently had success targeting older—and thus more vulnerable—members of those communities. By March 4, 84% of Arab-Israelis and about 80% of Haredi Israelis over 50 were vaccinated, up from 68% and 72% respectively on Feb. 22, according to Segal’s data. Aside from being the right thing to do on moral grounds, better vaccinating these groups could push Israel over the critical nationwide 70% mark. To achieve that goal, Israeli public health officials have been working to address two major problems: vaccine hesitancy among these and other groups, and a failure to reach some residents who live in remote areas with less access to vaccination facilities and trustworthy information. Its efforts could be instructive for the U.S., which is also struggling with comparatively lower vaccination rates among some demographic groups, and for similar reasons. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only has race and ethnicity data for just over half of the vaccinations administered in the U.S. as of March 15, but of those shots, nearly two thirds have gone to white Americans, while less than 10% have gone to Hispanic or Black Americans, who make up 18.5% and 13.4% of the U.S. population, respectively. In Israel, some groups are more vaccine hesitant or skeptical than others. A January survey from the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis found that 51% of yet-unvaccinated Arab-Israelis and 42% of Israeli Haredi Jews weren’t planning to get the shot, for instance, compared to just 34% of those who identified as either secular, cultural, or Reform Jews. There’s a similar phenomenon occurring in the U.S., where 42% of Republicans, 35% of rural residents and 35% of Black Americans said in December that they probably or definitely will not get the vaccine, compared to just 27% of the general public, per the Kaiser Family Foundation. Only 29% of Israelis overall say they trust the government, while 25% of Arab-Israelis say the same, according to the 2020 Israeli Democracy Index. Some Arab-Israelis have been angered by discrimination and hostility towards their community, as well as by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian territories like the West Bank and Gaza, where vaccinations have barely begun. Some Haredi Israelis, meanwhile, feel their culture and belief system is incompatible with what they view as Israel’s secular mainstream society, and many trust religious leaders over secular authorities. During the COVID-19 outbreak, Haredi groups have butted heads with government officials over lockdowns and restrictions; some have gathered for holidays and funerals despite restrictions against large groups. In an August poll, more than half of Israeli Haredim said their community’s trust in the current government was shaken amid the pandemic. All of this is relevant to the vaccine rollout, experts say, because people who distrust the government for any reason may be less likely to listen when it pushes a vaccine. “Sometimes, politics really goes against the interest of public health,” says Hadas Ziv, head of projects and ethics for medical nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights Israel. Arab-Israelis, Haredi Israelis and other Israelis have also been exposed to anti-vaccination messaging and misinformation on social media platforms like WhatsApp and via word of mouth. Some of the U.S. groups expressing relatively high vaccine hesitancy are similarly distrustful of the government—just 9% of Black Americans told Pew in 2019 that they trust Washington all or most of the time, compared to 17% of white Americans, for instance. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s politicization of the virus and vaccine approval sowed further skepticism, experts say—after Trump promised a vaccine by last year’s Election Day, about 62% of Americans told Kaiser that they were worried a shot would be green-lit for political reasons before it was proven safe and effective. Moreover, inadequate access to care and longstanding mistreatment by medical institutions has contributed to distrust of healthcare providers among Black Americans and other non-white groups. Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, meanwhile, runs rampant on American social media networks, as it does in Israeli online communities. While vaccine hesitancy has been dropping in recent weeks, according to a TIME/Harris Poll conducted earlier this month, it remains a major issue for U.S. health officials. To help solve the credibility issue, Israeli public health officials have turned to trusted voices in communities with low uptake. This approach “turns the gaze of the community to the experts to the local expert—and then the local expert does the persuasion,” says Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. In December, Aida Touma-Sliman, an Arab-Israeli member of Israel’s national legislature, tweeted a picture of herself being vaccinated to encourage other Arab-Israelis to do the same. “As someone who is very well known as part of the opposition, saying that in this situation, do not follow your mistrust of the government, but follow the best interest of your health—it sounds more like something to believe, than coming from Netanyahu: that despite my opposition, I am telling you, you should do it,” she says, referencing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yitzchak Zilberstein, a prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbi, shared a similar message with his community in December. “The risk of the vaccine is minimal compared to the many risks of the corona epidemic,” he wrote. Prominent Americans from Michelle Obama to Dolly Parton have similarly shared photos of themselves getting the vaccine in recent days. Access is also emerging as an increasingly vital issue in Israel. Many of the country’s 9 million people live in urban centers, like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; it’s been relatively easy for people there to walk into a vaccination site and get the jab. However, it’s been more challenging for the country to vaccinate people in historically underserved areas and communities, which are often largely Arab. “You can’t have places to get it in every tiny village,” says Orna Baron-Epel, a professor of health promotion at the University of Haifa. Similar patterns are playing out in the U.S., where access is suppressing vaccination rates in many predominantly Black neighborhoods, for instance. Israel has recently been working to make the vaccine easier to get across the country. Aiman Saif, a former government official who’s been tapped to lead Israel’s COVID-19 response among Arab groups, told Jewish-American news outlet The Forward in February that Israel boosted the number of vaccination locations in Arab-majority areas from five or six to over 50, while also adding 30 buses as mobile vaccination stations. Leaders in Israeli Orthodox communities have organized vaccination drives and seminars at religious schools and other locations to boost uptake as well. In the U.S., health systems and local governments have deployed mobile vaccination clinics in rural areas and high density, low-income areas, and the Biden Administration has spearheaded efforts to distribute vaccines at community health centers serving low-income and minority patients. Although Israel has shown that a lot can be done to reduce vaccine hesitancy and improve access, public health outreach to each of these groups must make up for decades of lost trust. While Israel has been making inroads in vaccinating some of the most vulnerable members of underserved groups, critics say leaders there were too slow to address these often predictable problems. Baron-Epel, for one, fears the government failed to invest enough resources in Arab communities earlier on, in particular. “The ideas are good, what they’re doing is good,” she says. “But it’s not enough, you know, and not fast enough.” The key lesson from Israel for the U.S. and other countries, then, may be a challenging one: hesitancy and access need to be addressed well before they become stumbling blocks late in the vaccine rollout. Methodology note: The number of COVID-19 deaths in Israel peaked on Jan. 25 at 0.74 fatalities per 100,000 residents, compared to a global peak of 0.18 one day later, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. While Israel’s peak value was much higher than the global average, its death rate has declined at a much steeper rate since the peak, though it’s too soon to know to what degree this can be attributed to vaccinations. For the sake of comparison, the first chart above presents both Israeli and global deaths as a percentage of the peak value—what’s called “normalizing” the data—so they can be easily compared. —With reporting by Chris Wilson from https://ift.tt/3eVn9lj Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ |
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