( Tomdispatch.com ) – Last month, not long after Florida federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the transportation mask mandate was illegal, I flew from New York City to Miami. Videos of airplane passengers in midflight ripping off their masks and cheering with joy had already gone viral following the judge’s ruling.

I’ve traveled domestically and internationally many times since the start of the pandemic and I hate the mask as much as anyone. It makes me sneeze and it tickles. After 10 hours on long hauls, I can indeed feel like I’m suffocating. It can be almost unbearable. But after two years of obediently masking up to enter airports and planes around the world, I found my first unmasked travel experience jarring indeed, even though I kept mine on. I was not the only masked person on that American Airlines flight, but I was definitely in the minority.

Writing a book, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic, about the politics and science of our Covid-19 experience, I came to know and trust public-health policy experts and vaccine scientists. I learned enough about the mRNA vaccines so many (but not enough) of us have received that I regard them as a major medical milestone well worth celebrating. I also accept that scientific understanding is based on uncertainty and the advice of our health authorities is only as good as the latest peer-reviewed article.

So I’ve maintained faith in science, even while understanding its limits. And I also understand the frustration of so many Americans. Who among us didn’t chafe at the pandemic restrictions? Who wasn’t going mad trying to work from a home or apartment reverberating with restless children locked out of their schools?

In March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, I thought the crisis might provoke wider support for a more universal health-care system. Nothing of the sort materialized, of course, although the rapid, government-financed development and delivery of free and effective vaccines — to those who wanted them — was indeed a success story.

Now, in the pandemic’s third year, people are ripping off their masks everywhere as Greek-letter Covid mutations continue to waft through the air.

The viral joy of that unmasking, the giving of the proverbial finger to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), begs the question: Did the pandemic make average Americans more anti-government? Did it bring us closer to what decades of rightwing propaganda had not quite succeeded in doing — generating widespread public support for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (a phrase favoredby Trump crony Steve Bannon)?

Government activity during the first two pandemic years was certainly intense. Trillions of dollars in business loans and unemployment money washed through the economy. At different points, the government even activated the military and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). States also instituted widespread lockdowns and closed schools. The panic, the isolation, and the quotidian inconveniences made some people barking mad.

Of course, a lot of us listened to Dr. Anthony Fauci. We trusted our public health authorities and their recommendations. To many of us, their intentions seemed good, their asks reasonable.

Federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, however, thought otherwise. Just 35 when Donald Trump appointed her a district judge, she had never actually tried a case. The American Bar Association had rejected her confirmation due to her inexperience, but like many Trump judges, she was a Federalist Society-approved ideologue and the Republican Senate confirmed her anyway to a district that, by design, has become a nest of extreme antigovernment judges.

The anti-maskers could have brought their case in any jurisdiction. Choosing Tampa was a clear case of legal venue shopping. Other judges in the district had consistently ruled against government Covid restrictions on cruise ships and against mandatory vaccinations. The plaintiffs couldn’t actually select Judge Mizelle, but their chances of getting an antigovernment ruling in Tampa were high indeed.

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As it happened, the plaintiffs got her and she relied on definitions of “sanitation” in mid-twentieth century English dictionaries to overturn the statute that allowed the mask mandate. None of them explicitly included the word “mask” in their definitions. So, she revoked it.

The ruling horrified public-health policy experts, although the Biden administration — probably with the coming midterm elections and those viral videos of mask-free joy in mind — decided not to challenge the decision directly. “The continuing concern throughout the pandemic has been the politicization of these public-health measures,” Dr. Bruce Lee, a public-health policy expert at the City University of New York, told me. “We know that throughout history during public-health crises there has been a need to enact regulations. The big concern with this mask decision is you basically have a scientific or public-health decision made by a single judge.”

It took that judge just 18 days after arguments — a nanosecond in judicial time — to side with two women who said airplane masks gave them panic attacks and anxiety and so unlawfully prevented them from traveling. They were joined by an organization called the Health Freedom Defense Fund.

Using the Virus to Seed Fresh Political Astroturf

The Fund, based in Sandpoint, Idaho, is run by Leslie Manookian, a wellness blogger and antivaccine activist who, after having a child in 2003, left a career in international finance with Goldman Sachs to become, as she describes herself, “a qualified homeopath, nutrition and wellbeing junky” and “a health freedom advocate.”

Manookian has declined to provide information about the sources of funding for her organization, to which the Internal Revenue Service granted nonprofit status in 2021. It’s likely, however, to be just another green swath on the great field of rightwing Astroturf. While social democrats like me imagined that the pandemic might provoke a more equitable health-care system, the crew on the right had other plans for how to manipulate the crisis.

Politicians, strategists, and chaos agents ranging from Donald Trump to Sean Hannity and Alex Jones, sometimes backed by dark money, have used the public-health restrictions to fuel their demands for more “freedom” from government. The definition of freedom among this crowd is primarily understood to be low or no taxes, with access to guns thrown in for good measure. In the spring of 2020, for instance, the billionaire Koch Brothers, who once funded the Tea Party largely to crush Obamacare, were among the conservative megadonors who helped activate the network behind the lockdown “drive-bys” of state capitols. Those initial lockdown protests would later devolve into Y’all-Qaeda-style pro-Trump pickup convoys. In Lansing, Michigan, a protest even ended with armed men entering the State Capitol. Among the intruders were members of a clan of gun-loving militiamen who would eventually plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan for restricting their freedom.

The pandemic seeded new Astroturf for the right. America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), for example, was formed during the early months of the pandemic to challenge public-health policy in favor of keeping the economy rolling. Besides promoting antivaccine misinformation, AFLDS referred more than 255,000 people to a website created by Jerome Corsi, an author and longtime political agitator, called SpeakwithanMD.com. The site charged for consultations with “AFLDS-approved physicians” about the Covid “cures” ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that President Trump and his fans so loved.

The messages of such groups (eventually including just about the whole Republican Party) were, of course, amplified by the usual rightwing media outlets — One America News Network, Newsmax, and above all Fox News — that started out by calling the pandemic virus a hoax. When Covid-19 was undeniably killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the messaging shifted to equating lockdowns, vaccines, and mask mandates with totalitarianism.

Globally, there’s no doubt that the pandemic did indeed release the worst instincts of authoritarian governments. Real autocracies unleashed real abuses of power on vulnerable people in the name of Covid-19. Some of these were catalogued early in the pandemic by the democracy and human-rights organization Freedom House. In October 2020, it found that, in 59 of 192 countries, violence or abuses of power took place in the name of pandemic safety. It reported, for example, that the government of Zimbabwe was using “Covid-19 restrictions as an excuse for a widespread campaign of threats, harassment, and physical assault” on the political opposition there.

In terms of hubris and scale, though, the totalitarian dystopia to beat has been China. Exiled Chinese writer Liao Wiyu published a vivid book earlier this year describing how the authorities there disappeared doctors, silenced the citizenry; and in a harrowing fashion nailed the doors of homes and apartment buildings shut, marking them with red banners to identify contagious inhabitants. The images were straight out of Daniel Defoe’s novel about the bubonic plague in seventeenth-century London, A Journal of the Plague Year, updated with modern gadgetry like biosurveillance.

China’s “zero Covid” response has included epic crackdowns on freedom of movement. Forty-six cities and 343 million residents have recently been under strict lockdown. Some residents of Shanghai, forbidden to leave their apartments, have been running short of food and medicine. Videos of dogs being lowered by ropes and pulleys from apartment windows for daily walks only added an element of macabre hilarity to the scene.

In the U.S., rather than increasing trust in government, the relatively mild pandemic public-health measures instituted by the CDC and state governments only inflamed America’s “freedom” fetish. Claiming that mask and vaccine mandates were the slippery slope to Chinese totalitarianism was certainly a stretch, but one that many on the right have been all too eager to promote. For years, the right-wing echo chamber has been priming the info-siloed and mentally vulnerable with warnings about “FEMA camps” for Christians and conservatives (and, of course, while they were at it, the feds were always coming to get your guns, too).

As it happened, though, the pandemic also triggered anti-government sentiment outside the usual quarters. Take Jennifer Sey, a self-described Elizabeth Warren Democrat and San Francisco liberal, who was forced out of her job at Levi Strauss & Co., when she started advocating against restrictive school closings. The mother of four and the company’s chief marketing officer, she found it increasingly hard to understand why her children couldn’t go back to school after the first Covid surge in 2020. Irritation and frustration led to public outrage, which led (of course!) to a social-media following. She became an online leader of parents for reopening schools. Her employer didn’t like it and soon banished her.

The Anti-Government Infection as a Symptom of “Long Covid”

Public-health policy expert Dr. Lee finds it less than surprising that even Americans like Sey rebelled. He mostly blames the way science was miscommunicated and politicized in public debate in this increasingly Trumpified country. “There needed to be consistency. Once you start straying from science and becoming inconsistent, people get confused. We saw people talking about school closures, and many of them were off in different directions. School closings were not a long-term solution. The increased politicization of science and public-health policy is largely a result of certain political leaders and certain TV personalities and anonymous social media accounts. What it does is, it damages — it causes chaos. You hear people saying, oh, they don’t know what to believe anymore.”

The question is: Where are we now? Along with the ongoing pandemic, are we experiencing a full-blown anti-government infection and is that, too, a symptom of “long Covid”? Or is the resistance to government mandates and vaccines simply a response to the Astroturfing of the rightwing echo chamber?

Or, in fact, both?

Conservatives have been smacking their lips over what they regard as signs of a resurgence of the flinty libertarian. “A funny thing happened on our way to democratic socialism: America pushed back,” a Cato Institute commentary proclaimed earlier this year. “Across the country, in all sorts of ways, Americans reacted to the state’s activism, overreach, incoherence, and incompetence and… kinda, sorta, embraced libertarianism.” (Of course, that’s putting it in an all too kindly fashion. Substitute, say, fascism and that statement feels quite different.)

Conservative commentator Sam Goldman, writing in the Week, hit the same note:

“As the pandemic has continued, opposition to restrictions on personal conduct, suspicion of expert authority, and free speech for controversial opinions have become dominant themes in center-right argument and activism. The symbolic villain of the new libertarian moment is Anthony Fauci.”

It’s not clear that this represents a lasting trend. An October 2021 Gallup poll found that American’s attitudes reverted from a desire for more government intervention at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 to essentially where they had been when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Since the 1990s, Gallup has been polling American preferences when it comes to the role of government in our lives. The long-term graph shows regular mood swings, although those between 2020 and 2021 were unusually steep.

Note as well that the American response to pandemic regulations differed strikingly from the European one. A study published earlier this year in the European Journal of Political Research explored attitudes in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, specifically the role of emotions in the way people responded to restricted civil liberties during the pandemic years (including restricted movement through Covid phone apps and army-patrolled curfews). Fear of contagion, not surprisingly, was the chief emotion and that fear led to a striking willingness to accept more government restrictions on civil liberties.

In Europe, safety won. In this country, it seems not. I haven’t seen similar research here (though there has been some suggesting that, in the Trump era, fear has been the driving emotion in individuals who lean right). It certainly seems as if the American response to the pandemic wasn’t to accept more restrictions on civil liberties, not at least when it came to masks and vaccine mandates.

But look more closely and you’ll see something else, something far more deeply unnerving. In these last months, even as masks have come off and booster shots have gone in all too few arms, there has been an unprecedented assault on other civil liberties. Red-state lawmakers are attacking the civil rights of women, gays, and minorities with unprecedented ferocity. In its landmark upcoming ruling that will, it seems, overturn Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court driven rightward by three Trump appointees has now apparently agreed that there is no right to privacy either.

As political journalist Ron Brownstein pointed out recently, conservative statehouses in red states “are remaking the American civil liberties landscape at breathtaking speed — and with little national attention to their cumulative effect.” In the process, they are setting back the civil-liberties clock in America to the years before what legal scholars called the “rights revolution” of the 1960s.

The speed and urgency with which right-wing judges and legislators are embracing a historic anti-liberty enterprise suggests panic and fear. This anti-freedom movement, ultimately, is not a response to the actions of the federal government or the CDC. It emanates from the frightened souls of the very people who have been shrieking about totalitarianism whenever they see a mask.

Now, excuse me for a moment, while I put my mask on and face an American world in which the dangers, both pandemic and political, are rising once again.

Copyright 2022 Nina Burleigh

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Nina Burleigh

Nina Burleigh, a TomDispatch regular, is a journalist of American politics and the author of six previous books. Her seventh, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic (just published by Seven Stories Press) is a real-life thriller that delves into the official malfeasance behind America’s pandemic chaos and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.

Via Tomdispatch.com

President Biden is not getting due credit for his incredible feat of vaccinating 200 million Americans. If the other eligible tens of millions had followed suit, the pandemic would have subsided in this country. The Commonwealth Fund finds that without Biden’s vaccination drive, a million and a half Americans would have died this year. As it was, 400,000 died. But there would have been 1.1 million more if Biden had not swung into action. That would have been 21,000 deaths a day. The worst actual one-day total, in January 2021, was 4,000, but that was before the delta variant, which was twice* as transmissible and twice as deadly as alpha.

Biden was the one who mobilized vaccinators from the military to cover a civilian medical shortfall. He was the one who mandated that companies with 100 or more employees had to require vaccinations. He provided the logistics, and he dragooned industry into it.

As he noted, his mandate is unpopular, and Republican governors sued him over it. Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee had the highest death rates in the US from COVID this year, and Mississippi has a vaccination rate of 47%. Its death rate was worse than Peru’s, and its Republican leadership has refused to do anything about it.

I have heard no one in the US press, no one among the cable TV talking heads, point out that Biden’s steps saved 1.1 million American lives. It is almost as though the big for-profit news corporations have CEOs who vote Republican.

That’s not all. Without Biden’s vaccination program, an additional 10 million Americans would have been hospitalized in 2021, according to the Commonwealth Fund.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

I don’t think it is easy to understand the scale of that catastrophe. There are only 919,000 fully staffed hospital beds in the United States. Spread over the year, 10 million would have been nearly 200,000 hospitalizations a week in the United States. That is nearly 1/4 of all the beds! And it isn’t like people would stop getting sick from other causes. Last week’s average was about 54,000 hospitalizations from COVID. At nearly 4 times that, there would not have been the beds in many hospitals. People would be stacked up on gurneys in hospital parking lots.

People who are not good at statistics sometimes point out, maliciously, that slightly more people died from COVID-19 under Biden’s watch than under Trump’s. They neglect to take into account that the delta variant entered the United States in March, and that it spreads around 10 times as fast as the old alpha variant did, and is 1.8 times as likely to put you in the ICU or kill you. Now we have the omicron variant, which is ten times more transmissible than delta, and so is replacing it. By a stroke of luck, early indications from Australia are that it is half as deadly as delta.

I admire journalists, but for-profit news has a serious problem with sensationalism. There are so many stories about so-called breakthrough infections and people dying of them, which don’t do a good job of telling people how effing rare that is. First of all, let’s lose the “breakthrough infection” term. We don’t use it with other diseases. Many of us get flu shots and sometimes you still get the flu. Nothing is perfect. The question is how likely it is. With people who have the three-shot regimen of Pfizer or Moderna it is extremely rare. But the newspapers keep putting breakthrough infections in their headlines, to get eyeballs and make money. It likely has the side effect of discouraging some people from getting vaccinated.

Biden isn’t done fighting this thing. He just made the tests free, a long overdue step. Now that his mandate to businesses has been upheld by the court, you will see millions more workers get vaccinated even in the deep south. The vast majority of people who threaten to quit over such mandates don’t follow through. People like getting their paycheck, and people can see in their workplace that the vaccines are safe and that their coworkers stop getting sick.

In South Africa, at least, the omicron wave subsided pretty fast. It spreads along networks, and runs into dead ends. In the US there are even more dead ends, since Biden vaccinated 200 million. There will likely be an omicron booster from Pfizer and Moderna by April, and their pills are also coming on the market. There is hope that things really will settle down by spring. But of course unless the industrialized world gets serious about vaccinating the whole of humankind, the potential for new variants remains.

—
*an earlier version of this post said that Delta was 10 times more transmissible than Alpha. Informed Comment regrets the error.

“Standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?”

Joshua Cohen at Forbes points out that Johnson called anti-vaxers to testify before his committee in 2020.

Mouthwashes often contain alcohol, which will in fact kill microbes like viruses. The problem is that the effect is temporary and COVID-19 is a respiratory disease that you can inhale through your nostrils or get on your hands and then rub into your eyes.

The way to vastly lower your chances of getting COVID-19 is to get vaccinated.

We have now done a real-time experiment in the efficacy of vaccinations against COVID-19, and the results are in. Almost all the people now getting sick with, being put into he ICU with, and dying from the coronavirus are unvaccinated.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

In Connecticut, for instance, only 1.2 percent of fully vaccinated residents have contracted COVID-19. For the most part, such patients are very elderly or have underlying medical conditions that interfere with the production of antibodies, so that the vaccine doesn’t fully work on them. But if you line up 100 people who are vaccinated, only one of them is likely to fall ill with COVID-19.

The unvaccinated are sixteen times more likely to die of the coronavirus than those who have gotten their shots.

NPR’s Daniel Wood reported on studies that found that the death rate from the coronavirus is three times higher in counties that voted for Trump than in those that voted for Biden. The tenth of counties that most heavily voted Republican, in fact, have at some points since May had has many as six times as many deaths as tenth of counties that most heavily voted Democratic, according to pollster Charles Gaba.

The disparity in serious disease and deaths holds true even when other differences, such as age, are taken into account. While the researchers cannot exactly match voter party identification to death rates in mixed counties, there is enough of a correlation here to be sure that party preference is driving this difference.

The mechanism whereby Republican voters are only 59% vaccinated while Democratic ones are 93% vaccinated is that many Republican politicians have spread misinformation about the virus and the vaccines.

We saw last year the leader of the Republican Party claim that the coronavirus is “just a flu,” that it would “disappear,” that it could be cured by drinking bleach (which will kill you dead) or by ingesting hydroxychloroquine (which can weaken your heart) or by taking ivermectin, used to kill parasites in horses.

Since the former guy was banished on social media his role in spreading deadly republican quackery in public has been taken up by cranks such as Johnson. He is joined by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas. Both of them are physicians. Marshall hasn’t discouraged vaccination across the board but has said that people who have had COVID don’t need a shot (they do) and has said that masks don’t work and even do more harm than good. Masks have been found to be 80% effective against transmission of the virus and so are almost as good as being vaccinated.

It isn’t only the certifiable wing of the current Republican Party that is responsible for this fatal misinformation. Even smart and informed Republican politicians are at least remaining silent on this issue for fear of the storm troopers in their own base. Virtually everyone who has died of the virus since June 1, some 1,000 a day, died because they were not vaccinated and were victims of misinformation at the hands of their party leaders. That is a kind of genocide.

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Bonus Video:

“Sen. Ron Johnson LIES to constituents about mouthwash as coronavirus treatment”

As lockdowns ease in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT, and people return to work and socialising, many of us will be mixing more with others, even though a section of the community is still unvaccinated.

Many vaccinated people are concerned about the prospect of mixing with unvaccinated people. This mixing might be travelling on trains or at the supermarket initially. But also at family gatherings, or, in NSW at least, at pubs and restaurants when restrictions ease further, slated for December 1.

Some people are wondering, why would a vaccinated person care about the vaccine status of another person?

Briefly, it’s because vaccines reduce the probability of getting infected, which reduces the probability of a vaccinated person infecting someone else. And, despite vaccination providing excellent protection against severe disease, a small proportion of vaccinated people still require ICU care. Therefore some vaccinated people may have a strong preference to mix primarily with other vaccinated people.

But what exactly is the risk of catching COVID from someone who’s unvaccinated?

What’s the relative risk?

Recent reports from the Victorian Department of Health find that unvaccinated people are ten times more likely to contract COVID than vaccinated people.

We also know that vaccinated people are less likely to transmit the disease even if they become infected. The Doherty modelling from August puts the reduction at around 65%, although more recent research has suggested a lower estimate for AstraZeneca. Hence for this thought experiment, we’ll take a lower value of 50%.

As the prevalence of COVID changes over time, it’s hard to estimate an absolute risk of exposure. So instead, we need to think about risks in a relative sense.

If I were spending time with an unvaccinated person, then there’s some probability they’re infected and will infect me. However, if they were vaccinated, they’re ten times less likely to be infected and half as likely to infect me, following the numbers above.

Hence we arrive at a 20-fold reduction in risk when hanging out with a vaccinated person compared to someone who’s not vaccinated.

The exact number depends on a range of factors, including the type of vaccine and time since vaccination. But, in Australia we can expect a large risk reduction when mixing with fully vaccinated people.

The calculation holds true whether you yourself are vaccinated or not. But being vaccinated provides a ten-fold reduction for yourself, which is on top of the risk reduction that comes from people you’re mixing with being vaccinated.

So, dining in an all-vaccinated restaurant and working in an all-vaccinated workplace presents a much lower infection risk to us as individuals, whether we are vaccinated or not. The risk reduction is around 20-fold, but as individuals, we need to consider whether that’s meaningful for our own circumstances, and for the circumstances of those we visit.

There are also added complexities, in that there are three vaccine brands available, and eligibility is still limited to those aged 12 and older. Although, we do know kids are less susceptible and less likely to show symptoms.

However, as more information emerges, we can always update our estimates and think through the implications on the risk reduction.

What about people who can’t be vaccinated?

Some people haven’t been able to get vaccinated because they’re either too young or they have a medical exemption. Other people are immunocompromised and won’t get the same level of protection from two doses as the rest of the community.

Increasing our coverage across the board will help protect those who aren’t fully protected by vaccination (whether that’s by eligibility, medical reasons or choice).

Those at higher risk also enjoy the risk reduction if they’re able to mix primarily with vaccinated people.

And other choices we make can help reduce the risk of transmission when vaccination is impossible, for example, wearing masks, washing hands carefully, and so on.

Do rapid antigen tests help?

Some people have proposed that frequent testing could be used to suppress COVID spread for those who are unwilling to be vaccinated.

Health minister Greg Hunt said Australians can buy rapid antigen tests from November 1, so they can test themselves at home or before entering certain venues.

So how much does a rapid antigen test reduce risk to others?

To answer that question we need to consider test sensitivity.

Test sensitivity is the probability a rapid test will return a positive result, if the person is infected.

It’s challenging to get an accurate estimate. But rapid antigen tests are about 80% as sensitive as a PCR test, which are the traditional COVID tests we do that get sent off to a lab. The PCR tests themselves are about 80% sensitive when it comes to identifying someone with COVID.

So, if you did a rapid antigen test at home, it’s about 64% likely to pick up that you’re positive, if you did have COVID.

Therefore, rapid antigen tests can find about two-thirds of cases. If you’re going to a gathering where everyone has tested negative on a rapid antigen test, that’s a three-fold reduction in risk.

Even though rapid tests provide a reduction in risk, they don’t replace vaccines.

When used in conjunction with high levels of vaccination, rapid tests would provide improved protection for settings where we’re particularly keen to stop disease spread, such as hospitals and aged care facilities.

Consequently, despite the high efficacy of COVID vaccines, there are still reasons a vaccinated person would prefer to mix with vaccinated people, and avoid mixing with unvaccinated people.

This is particularly true for those at higher risk of severe disease, whether due to age or disability. Their baseline risk will be higher, so a 20-fold reduction in risk is more meaningful.

Christopher Baker, Research Fellow in Statistics for Biosecurity Risk, The University of Melbourne and Andrew Robinson, CEO of the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Eyewitness News: “NYC announces COVID vaccine mandate for all municipal workers”

I pointed out to Mr. Carlson that actually it was the Iraqis who invented much of what we now call civilization. But here is another kicker: Saudi Arabia, the bastion of a peculiar kind of Wahhabism or ultra-fundamentalist form of Islam, is putting in a whole range of vaccine mandates. Its religious and state officials now say that anyone who comes on pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca must have two doses of a WHO-approved vaccine.

Ramadan El Sherbini at Gulf News reported on Thursday,

“the Saudi Interior Ministry said that starting from October 10, obtaining two doses of vaccines approved in Saudi Arabia will be a condition for attending any economic, commercial, academic, cultural, entertainment, sports or tourism event in the country. The inoculation will also be compulsory for entering government or private institutions, using public transport and boarding planes.”

The Interior Minister, Abdulaziz bin Saud Al Saud, is a younger prince of the royal family with a modern education, and he clearly knows something serious about public health policy.

The contrast with the US Republican Party, which is like Saudi Arabia in hewing to a Religious Right program, could not be more stark. In eight states, Republican lawmakers have legislated, or Republican governors have issued executive orders, banning vaccine mandates by employers. Those laws and regulations have put them in direct conflict with President Joe Biden’s order that employers who don’t implement vaccine mandates for their employees will be denied federal funding.

Republican states have not hesitated to require vaccinations against other diseases such as polio, so it is not clear why they are so opposed to the safe and effective vaccinations against Sars-Cov-2, which have been given to billions of people without significant adverse effects (and what minuscule such effects have been observed are far less serious than the impact of the disease itself).

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has threatened to cut off state funds from institutions such as schools and from state contractors who implement vaccine mandates, saying “We are not going to let people get fired because of the vaccine mandate. You don’t just cast aside people who have been serving faithfully over this issue, over what’s basically a personal choice over their individual health.”

This statement is of course terminally stupid, since spreading around a deadly virus is not a personal choice but is rather one individual making a choice of how healthy his or her entire community will be. The R-naught of the Delta variant is between 5 and 9, which means that each person who contracts it typically spreads it to 5-9 other people. In the unvaccinated population, that would give you a progression at the upper level of 9, 81, 729, 6,561, so that in just a few days one carrier of the Delta variant could spread it to six and a half thousand other people.

That is not, Mr. DeSantis, “a personal choice over their individual health.”

Some of the opposition to vaccine mandates is fueled by evangelical Christian preachers and leaders, who have an outsized influence on the Republican Party.

In contrast, Saudi authorities have put in vaccine mandates regardless of any religious hesitancy. It is hardly alone in the Muslim world. The premier Sunni Muslim university and seminary, al-Azhar in Egypt, is requiring students and faculty to be vaccinated. Egypt is receiving 25 million Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccines over the next four months, which would bring the percentage of its population that is vaccinated up to about 35 percent. Al Jazeera reports that among the only countries to mandate that all citizens over 18 be vaccinated are Muslim-majority Takikistan and Uzbekistan. Muslim-majority Kazakhstan requires state employees in contact with the public to be vaccinated.

Those uncivilized Muslims!

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Bonus video:

Saudi Arabia: No COVID-19 vaccine, no Mecca tells government| Coronavirus | Latest World News | WION

A devout evangelical Christian friend of mine recently texted to explain why he was not getting the COVID-19 vaccine. “Jesus went around healing lepers and touched them without fear of getting leprosy,” he said.

This story that St. Luke tells in his gospel (17:11-19) is not the only Bible verse I have seen and heard evangelical Christians use to justify anti-vaccine convictions. Other popular passages include Psalm 30:2: “Lord, I called to you for help, and you healed me.”; 1 Corinthians 6:19: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?”; and Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of a creature is in the blood.”

All of these verses have been lifted out of context and repurposed to buttress the anti-vaccine movement. As a historian of the Bible in American life, I can attest that such shallow reading in service of political and cultural agendas has long been a fixture of evangelical Christianity.

Bible in the hands of ordinary people

In the 16th century, Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers translated the Bible from an already existing Greek text into the languages of common people. Prior to this, most men and women in Europe were exposed to the Bible through the Vulgate, a Latin version of the Old and New Testaments that only educated men – mostly Catholic priests – could read.

As people read the Bible – many for the first time – they inevitably began to interpret it as well. Protestant denominations formed around such interpretations. By the time Protestants started forming settlements in North America, there were distinctly Anglican, Presbyterian, Anabaptist, Lutheran and Quaker reading of the Bible.

The English Calvinists who settled the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay built entire colonies around their reading of the Bible, making New England one of the most literate societies in the world. In the 18th century, popular access to the Bible was one way that the British – including the North American colonies – distinguished themselves from Catholic nations that did not provide such access.

American evangelicals

In the early 19th-century United States, biblical interpretation became more free-wheeling and individualistic.

Small differences over how to interpret the Bible often resulted in the creation of new sects such as the Latter Day Saints, the Restorationists (Disciples of Christ and Churches of Christ), Adventists and various evangelical offshoots of more longstanding denominations such as Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Quakers.

During this period, the United States also grew more democratic. What the French traveler and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville described as “individualism” had a profound influence on biblical interpretation and the way laypeople read the sacred text.

The views of the Bible proclaimed from the pulpits of formally educated clergy in established denominations gave way to a more free-wheeling and populist understanding of the scriptures that was often dissociated from such authoritative communities.

But these evangelicals never developed their approach to understanding the Bible in complete isolation. They often followed the interpretations of charismatic leaders such as Joseph Smith (Latter Day Saints), Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell (Restorationist), William Miller (Adventists) and Lorenzo Dow (Methodists).

These preachers built followers around innovative readings of the Scriptures. Without a church hierarchy to reign them in, these evangelical pied pipers had little accountability.

When large numbers of Irish and German immigrants arrived on American shores in the middle decades of the 19th century, evangelicals drew on longstanding anti-Catholic prejudices. They grew anxious that these Catholic newcomers were a threat to their Protestant nation and often based these fears on perceptions of how Catholic bishops and priests kept the Bible from their parishioners.

While this fear of Catholics was mostly rhetorical in nature, there were a few moments of violence. For example, in 1844, nativist Protestants, responding to rumors that Catholics were trying to remove the Bible from Philadelphia public schools, destroyed two of the city’s Catholic churches before the Pennsylvania militia stopped the violence.

These so-called “Bible riots” revealed the deep tensions between the individualistic and common-sensical approach to biblical interpretation common among Protestants and a Catholic view of reading the Bible that was always filtered through the historic teachings of the Church and its theologians. Protestants believed that the former approach was more compatible with the spirit of American liberty.

Vaccine opposition and the Bible

Today this American approach to reading and the interpreting the Bible is front and center in the arguments made by evangelical Christians seeking religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccination mandates. When they explain their religious objections to health officials, employers and school administrations, evangelicals select verses, usually out of context, and reference them on exemptions forms.

Like they did in the 19th century, evangelicals who refuse to get vaccinated today tend to follow the spiritual leaders who have built followings by baptizing political or cultural propaganda in a sea of Bible verses.

Megachurch pastors, televangelists, conservative media commentators and social media influencers have far more power over ordinary evangelical Christians than those local pastors who encourage their congregations to consider that God works through science.

When I ask those evangelicals who oppose vaccines how they come to their conclusions, they all seem to cite the same sources: Fox News, or a host of fringe media personalities whom they watch on cable television or Facebook. Some others they cite include Salem Radio host and author Eric Metaxas, the Liberty Counsel and Tennessee megachurch leader Greg Locke, to name a few.

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Social media allows these evangelical conspiracy theorists to become influential through their anti-vaccine rants.

From my perspective, the response of some evangelicals to the vaccine reveals the dark side of the Protestant Reformation. When the Bible is placed in the hands of the people, void of any kind of authoritative religious community to guide them in their proper understanding of the text, the people can make it say anything they want it to say.

John Fea, Professor of American History, Messiah College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNN: “Many Evangelicals say they won’t be vaccinated against Covid-19”

During a short break from vigorous windmill tilting, DeSantis recently gave a fascinating rhetorical monologue:“The question is we can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state”. “And I can tell you, Florida, we’re a free state. People are going to be free to choose to make their own decisions about themselves about their families, about their kids’ education and about putting food on the table. … Let me tell you this: If you’re coming after the rights of parents in Florida, I’m standing in your way, I’m not going to let you get away with it.”

Meanwhile, as another wave of Covid struck America, and Florida’s infection is through the roof, Gov. Ron DeSantis has taking the Covid-19 misinformation campaign to a new low by selling merchandise that is not only anti-medicine, but directly attacks Dr. Anthony Fauci. Now available from our governor are T-shirts, beer cozies and cheap mugs with logos :”Keep Florida Free” and “Don’t Fauci my Florida”, all a deadly and childish ploy to further seduce the anti-vax/QAnon crowd. “While hospitals in our state were filling up, DeSantis was shouting about ‘Freedom over Faucism,'” said Bernard Ashby, a Miami-based cardiologist and head of the of the Florida chapter of the Committee to Protect Health Care. “If DeSantis were as concerned about stopping Covid-19 spread as he was about coming up with these clever jabs about Dr. Fauci, we might not be in this position.” While DeSantis has publicly stressed the importance of vaccination in recent days, Florida physicians have attributed the surge in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the state to the governor’s rush to end public health restrictions.

DeSantis continues to play to the cheap seats by preying on those who want to turn this into an outrage and wedge issue, and make campaign money off of COVID while minimizing the pain of those who have lost loved ones in Florida and across the country. It is dismaying to see where we are in the state of Florida, where the cases this last week have almost doubled from the week before at 45,000 cases. One out of every five new cases is coming out of Florida. It’s grotesque, irresponsible , deadly— the idea of spiting ourselves, of harming ourselves in order to own the liberals . People like Ron DeSantis (and Don Quixote) do not see the world for what it is, and prefer to imagine, as does Gov. DeSantis, that he is living out an imaginary story where the adversary/windmill is the “biomedical security state”.

PUBLIC HEALTH COVID-19 TRAVELERS ALERT – FLORIDA

Everyone planning a visit to Florida should first make certain that their ‘living will’ is up-to-date. Very important also is to bring your living will with you since Florida GOP governor and DJT sycophant, Ron DeSantis, announced the complete reopening of Florida, allowing crowds in restaurants and bars. He won’t allow city governments to fine residents who won’t wear masks or establishments that do not honor social distancing.

Florida schools and universities are being undermined by Gov. DeSantis/GOP policies that completely contradict messages that local school boards and universities, such as University of Florida, are telling their students about following safe practices. The governor is encouraging risky behavior while acting like he is more expert than faculty at UF in the schools of public health, medicine, pharmacy, nursing etc., the CDC and other Florida and U.S. universities who have actual expertise in infectious diseases, the basic principles of epidemiology and public health. DeSantis risks repeating what happened after he took a premature victory lap in late April 2020, as he lifted COVID-related limits on businesses. Just a few weeks later a summer surge of cases forced the state to ban drinking at bars, where crowded conditions had contributed to the spread of the virus.

Currently, Florida has suffered one of the largest case tolls in the U.S.Testing is returning less than a 5% positivity rate, which the CDC considers a “lower risk” but not “lowest risk” for opening schools. DeSantis’s prescriptions for bars and restaurants to operate with no masks or social distancing are the “highest risk”procedures according to the CDC and seem likely to provoke a big second wave in fall-winter.

COVID-19 is especially deadly to the elderly, and Florida has a disproportionate number of retirees, so DeSantis’s measures are likely to kill a lot of older adults, ages 60 and up.. But with schools soon reopening and people thinking maybe the worst was over and gathering again in bars, restaurants, and sport venues you get a big jump in cases to worrying levels. DeSantis is setting Florida up for an even worse spike. Just letting many people die is not a policy. It is a sort of genocide by malign neglect on behalf of the business community.

The state of Florida now accounts for one in five new coronavirus infections in the United States, making it the nation’s most alarming hot spot as the highly transmissible Delta strain rips through undervaccinated communities and drives a surge in hospitalizations. According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida has recorded 73,181 new Covid-19 cases over the past week, the most in the country. Florida also logged the most coronavirus deaths of any U.S. state in the last seven days—319—and hospitalizations are spiking, prompting dire warnings from physicians and calls for public safety measures to stop the spread.

Gov. DeSantis’s deceptively innocent, delusional “feel good” Florida Covid model has accelerated the traditional GOP lockstep service to the very rich corporate sector and has mobilized extremist sectors of society in the assault against 99% of the population -— to privatize, deregulate, limit Fla. government and increase austerity while retaining those profiteering parts that serve their .001% masters/patrons wealth, power, including GOP oligarchs and other politicians beholden to unaccountable private corporations.

A health professional working at a Florida hospital reports his emergency room is now full with people suffering from COVID. None were vaccinated, including many of his co-workers and nurses. Remarkably, most of these health professionals got the usual childhood vaccines for polio, smallpox, and well established vaccines for typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, tetanus. Why is Covid-19 vaccine different from all other vaccines?

The answer is that the anti-vax movement overlaps with the Trump movement. Much needed is a vaccine against delusional/magical thinking, thinking that’s promoted by GOP politicians like Gov. Ron DeSantis and others.The only way to slow down these surges is for everyone to get vaccinated, and strictly follow the basic principles of epidemiology and public health. The longer we wait, the more people will die. Let’s hope that everyone, including Gov. DeSantis, will be realistic and follow the basic public health principles of epidemiology. And of course, not follow Don Quixote, who’s story, as everyone knows, did not end well.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

MSNBC: “Covid Experts Send Message To Floridians Amid DeSantis Disinformation”

Conservatives, who often maintain they are supporters of freedom, have in fact engaged in draconian assertions of executive power. Not only do they resist vaccination and masking requirements, they also prohibit local governments or private corporations from enacting their own regulations. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis puts this in the starkest terms. The Miami Herald reported in May,

“DeSantis … said he would sign an executive order invalidating all remaining local emergency COVID orders that are still in place after July 1 and suspend immediately any orders related to COVID-19 now. The measure would make it more difficult for local governments to respond to public emergencies by requiring any future emergency orders to be narrowly tailored and extended only in seven-day increments for a total of 42 days and gives the governor the authority to invalidate an emergency order. Currently, such orders can be extended indefinitely”.

If this were a liberal governor depriving local cities’ rights to deregulate health and safety matters conservative media would decry paternalism and term the action an expression of contempt for ordinary people. More proof They regard Us as deplorable.

Unfortunately proponents of public health campaigns too often have given their opponents ample opportunity to scream paternalism. Consider CDC’s initial response to Covid 19. As Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith puts it:

“The CDC and the WHO were late to take Covid seriously despite China having to build new facilities on an emergency basis to house the afflicted and implementing hard shutdown on 70% of its economy. Part of that was discouraging the public from masking (even making home-made face covers), later justified as a Noble Lie to preserve supplies for medical workers.”

I take as most significant in this analysis the willingness of CDC, including the revered Dr. Fauci, to lie. And the bureaucracy’s sense that it must lie, even for praiseworthy ends, suggests at a minimum lack of respect for a democratic electorate. Or even contempt.

Equally problematic has been the frequent mantra that we follow the science. Apparently some DC bureaucrats believe we citizens cannot handle the possibility that there is significant controversy within science itself as to the mode of transmission of the Covid 19 virus

CDC Rigid adherence to the droplet paradigm for virus transmission as opposed to fine-particle aerosol transmission slowed the policy response and left the public unprepared for any shift in course.

I agree with the contention some have made that any public health initiative is likely to evoke blowback. No matter what the initiative there is a core coalition of supremacist and xenophobic groups who would do anything to defeat a public health agenda. And years of underfunding have taken their toll on the ability of the state to resist a pathogenic virus and a pathogenic politics.

The success of a public health initiative depends in part on not only with whom it is associated but also where.Conservative cultural warriors have overplayed their hands when they or their hand-picked governors endorse or enact statutes forbidding local governments from imposing masking or vaccination requirement. They are in effect anti-political ordinances. Individuals who might resent a universal vaccine requirement might accept local ordinances democratically enacted and often also take serious exception to laws that forbade them from action at the local level.

On a larger level reliance on local politics may seem too slow in an era of rapid climate change. The concern is well taken, but even universal mandates still require enforcement as well as overcoming legal challenge. In addition, local initiatives, especially ones built around affirmation of politics, can be contagious. Finally as Tocqueville recognized, local governments and other voluntary associations stood between individual citizens and the state, thus providing a bulwark for a diverse society and polity. That concern is even more pressing today.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Channel 4 News: “Vaccine hesitancy and misinformation fuelling rising Covid cases in Florida”

And ABC News reports that the US now has the highest average daily number of new coronavirus cases in the world..

Only about 57% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated. The advent of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is ten times more transmissible than the original and 85% more likely to put you in the hospital, means that 43% of Americans are willfully exposing themselves to this monster and also risking spreading it to others. If we subtract the 50 million children under age 12 from the population and multiply the remainder by .43, we get 116,100,000 Americans who are risking the lives of the other unvaccinated and of themselves.

The unvaccinated are disproportionately concentrated in the Bible Belt and the Deep South, i.e., in Trump country. Only 39% of Alabamans are vaccinated. Even their Republican governor called this out as a lack of common sense.

Moreover, even the vaccinated are being exposed to the risk of infection by these people, although almost none of the vaccinated will have to go to hospital or risk death. Me, I don’t want that nasty virus at all.

And all of us, vaccinated and unvaccinated, have to pay the bill when the unvaccinated get Covid-19, as Edward-Isaac Dovere pointed out at the Atlantic. Our taxes will be higher and our insurance premiums will go up, because these selfish people are risking their lives.

The willfully unvaccinated among Republicans are like people with gonorrhea who go around having sex with other people without a condom. That is basically what is happening when an unvaccinated Trumper breathes on you.

Admittedly, there are lots of reasons that some Americans have not gotten vaccinated. Some minorities don’t live near a place that offers the vaccine, or they are working so many hours each week it is difficult for them to find an opportunity, or they can’t afford to take time off work. Others remember when the government did illegal experiments on their people and so have an aversion to recommendations of the white medical establishment.

But for many in “Red Counties,” these considerations do not hold. They just don’t want to get a vaccine, and they believe forcing them to wear a mask is a violation of their individual liberty. News flash: people don’t have the individual liberty to breathe their deadly germs on us. And we have the individual liberty not to die in an intensive care unit.

In addition, a great deal of this vaccine and mask refusal is driven by loony tunes conspiracy theories like that Microsoft’s Bill Gates is using the vaccine to put a computer microchip in you so as to control or monitor your thoughts and behavior.

I can remember when wearing a tinfoil hat was a rare eccentricity. But one poll found that fully forty-four percent of Republicans believe the microchip conspiracy theory.

About a quarter of the 330 million Americans identify as Republicans, or 80 million people. 43% of them is 34.4 million people. That is a lot of people to be off their rockers. Worse, the mental condition could get consolidated. Those 34 million are the most likely victims-in-waiting of the Delta variant, and the coronavirus leaves 1/5 of those it strikes with long term mental problems. You never want to see a hot mess of that magnitude.

Many Republican state legislators have spread around misinformation about the vaccines. These people have many sociopaths in their ranks who have no conscience about endangering their constituents. If they think it will be popular to reject vaccines and masks, they will do so, so as to get reelected and go on feeding at the public trough.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is on a crusade against schoolchildren wearing masks, putting forward silly and unscientific reasons for it. Masks don’t make you lightheaded, don’t give you fungal infections, don’t interfere with learning and aren’t a form of child abuse. Children cannot yet be vaccinated, and while their vulnerability is low, Delta is more of a danger to them than the original virus and it is unwise to send them among big crowds with no protection.

A renewed mask mandate in the House of Representatives is being angrily rejected by some Republican lawmakers, who apparently think it is all right to spread a deadly disease in the halls of Congress.

This attitude is in some large part because Republican politicians decided to make getting a vaccine or wearing a mask into a “culture wars” issue.

Some things I can understand as culture wars issues. People’s values differ among US subcultures. Urban people differ from small-town or rural ones on some issues, having been shaped by a different style of life.

But spreading around a dangerous respiratory infection isn’t a matter of culture. It is just selfish and is often a sign of irrationality. It is people insisting on giving you the bronchial equivalent of gonorrhea by screwing you over for their own weird purposes.

I propose we replace the weasel term “vaccine hesitancy” with “vaccine selfishness.”

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBS News: “COVID-19 cases surge in areas with low vaccination rates”