Biden’s 70% Vaccinated By July 4 Target Falls Eight Million Short But Is ‘Still A Success’ Biden wanted 70% of adults to have one dose by Independence Day but nationwide take-up is 66.2% https://www.zenger.news/2021/07/01/...s-eight-million-short-but-is-still-a-success/ The White House is expected to fall short of its goal for 70 percent of U.S. adults to have received at least one coronavirus vaccine jab by July 4, but should not consider it a major failure, experts told Zenger on Thursday. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. acknowledged last week that his administration will likely fall short of the threshold it set for vaccinations by the July 4 deadline. But with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that 57.2 percent of Americans over 18 are fully vaccinated and 66.2 percent have received at least one dose, some experts told Zenger the effort to administer vaccines has still been a success. The gap between Biden’s target and the number of adults who have had one dose is 8.5 million, but there are extreme geographical variations in the levels of vaccination. The states that lag the most are Mississippi (where 36 percent has had one dose and 30 percent are fully vaccinated), Louisiana (38 percent with one and 35 percent fully), Idaho (39 and 36 percent), Wyoming (39 and 34 percent) and Alabama (40 and 33 percent), according to USAFacts, a “not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic initiative” that compiles public U.S. government data. The best performing states, so far, are Vermont (74 and 66 percent), Hawaii (70 and 52 percent) and Massachusetts (70 and 61 percent) — all of which met Biden’s goal — and Connecticut (67 and 61 percent) and Maine (66 and 61 percent). That led to a warning from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that the U.S. risked a resurgence of the virus in areas with low take-up as the more infectious Delta variant spread rapidly. “There is a danger, a real danger, that if there is a persistence of a recalcitrance to getting vaccinated that you could see localized surges,” he said at a White House press briefing late last month. “When you have such a low level of vaccination superimposed upon variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are going to see among under-vaccinated regions, be that states, cities or counties, you’re going to see these individual types of blips,” Fauci later added in a televised interview. “It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.” “This is entirely avoidable, entirely preventable. If you are vaccinated, you diminish dramatically your risk of getting infected and even more dramatically your risk of getting seriously ill. If you are not vaccinated, you are at considerable risk.” But conservative-leaning think tanks said that the success of vaccinating older people meant that the most at-risk populations had been protected and the White House should consider that measure the most important benchmark of success. The CDC says that 88.2% of over-65s have had one dose of the vaccine and 78.3% are fully immunized. “The reason they’re not reaching [70 percent] is because there are not a lot of people left to vaccinate, and that gets to the issue that a percentage of the general population is really not the appropriate metric here,” said Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow and healthcare policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. Haislmaier said it’s clear “vaccines have been widely available” in the U.S. so the inability to reach the 70-percent threshold was not a severe policy failure. “There is sufficient supply in the system,” he said. “If all the people who haven’t been vaccinated suddenly wanted to get vaccinated, there’s the supply there to do it.” “The more appropriate metrics are to look at the population subsets that are most at-risk and say, ‘How well have we done there?’ And when you do that — that’s particularly the elderly — the numbers are quite high,” Haislmaier added. “In terms of reaching the population most at risk … we pretty much have done that.” Among those who have yet to receive a jab are those who have been infected and recovered — who, in some areas, were not prioritized for a shot because they had natural antibodies — as well as those who remain hesitant about vaccine safety. “When you have this many people who have already gotten vaccinated, I think the majority of people who have not yet gotten vaccinated are probably unpersuadable,” Jeff Singer, senior fellow for health policy studies at the Cato Institute, told Zenger. “They’ve kind of made up their minds and are willing to take their chances.” The refusal of so many Americans to get vaccinated, coupled with the fact that many had already contracted COVID-19 and recovered, made Biden’s hopes for 70% of adults by July 4 somewhat of an “unrealistic goal,” Singer said. The CDC strongly advises people who have had COVID-19 to receive the vaccine. While evidence has shown that recovered coronavirus patients do develop natural antibodies, research has not determined how long they last or how effective they are at combating the virus, and particularly newer more severe strains, such as the Delta variant. There have been cases of reinfection, and it is not known if the recovered are “definitively immune to SARS-CoV-2 reinfection because biologic markers of immunity have not been correlated with protection from infection,” the CDC says. However, the department has noted that most recovered adults had some immunity for at least 90 days after diagnosis. In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers found that 95 percent of the 200 recovered participants still had durable immune “memories” of the virus as long as eight months after infection. Scientists and officials have also sounded the alarm over the emerging Delta variant. Having spread to almost every state, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky indicated last month that the Delta variant was expected to soon be the dominant strain in the U.S. In a recent White House briefing, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci also warned that the Delta variant was already considered to be “the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19.” Currently considered only a “variant of concern,” it has shown evidence of increased transmissibility, more severe disease when contracted and appears to have the ability to reduce of impact of antibodies created by previous infection or vaccination. However, mutations of the virus have so far had a “negligible effect,” Haislmaier argued, pointing to a study showing that receiving both doses of the Pfizer vaccine is 88 percenteffective against the Delta strain and an announcement from Moderna that its two-dose vaccine also has a neutralizing effect against the variant. “The current vaccines seem to be roughly as effective against that strain as they were against the original strain, particularly the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines,” he said, adding its higher transmissibility was still a big issue for the unvaccinated. Singer said that Delta’s higher transmissibility may now be “an incentive for the people who are still holding out on getting vaccinated.” “We’re approaching herd immunity,” Singer said. “That doesn’t mean eradication of the virus. It means there are enough blockages for the pathways for the virus to take so that you’re not going to see major outbreaks that are disruptive to everyday life.” “In the parts of the country where people have not gotten vaccinated, you’re going to see more cases,” he explained. “But if you’ve gotten vaccinated … I don’t think you need to worry about this variant more than any of the other variants.” There is also the question of the rest of the world, Singer noted. He argued that rather than continuing to push the vaccine amid a plateauing vaccination rate at home, the Biden administration may want to focus more on its efforts to distribute doses to other countries in need, including nearby countries in Latin America. In early June, the White House unveiled its plan to share 80 million U.S. vaccine doses worldwide by the end of the month — with the first 25 million going to countries in South and Central America, Asia and Africa, before ramping the program up further. “At this point, we’re hitting a point of diminishing returns by pushing vaccination on the American public,” Singer said. “They got it, and those who are refusing to get vaccinated are unlikely to change their mind. So let’s get this vaccine out to the people in the rest of the world who really want it and don’t have access to it.”
20 states have already reached 70% vaccination rate https://www.businessinsider.com/20-states-have-already-reached-70-vaccination-rate-2021-7 20 states have given at least one dose of a vaccine to at least 70% of their adult population. President Joe Biden had a goal of vaccinating 70% of adults across the country by July 4. Vermont has the highest vaccination rate with 85.3%, The New York Times reported. While the whole country won't meet President Joe Biden's July 4 goal for vaccinating 70% of their adult population, twenty states have given at least one dose of a vaccine to at least 70% of their population, The New York Times reported. Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam have also reached the 70% mark. The states that reached at least 70% are mostly in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region. Vermont has the highest vaccination rate with 85.3%, followed by Hawaii with 83.5%. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Mexico, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, California, Washington, New Hampshire, New York, Illinois, Virginia, Delaware, and Minnesota, Colorado, and Oregon have also reached the 70% mark. The vast majority of states with the least vaccination rate are in the South. Even as vaccination rates are high in some parts of the country, those with the least amount of their population vaccinated are at risk of a surge in cases as the more transmissible Delta variant — which originated in India — becomes a growing concern. Experts told Insider's Aria Bendix and Joanna Lin Su that they ideally want communities to have at least a 75% vaccination rate so the virus is less able to spread from person to person. More than 66.8% of American adults over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, data from the Centers for Disease Control shows. Overall, 54.7% of the population is fully vaccinated.
Tired of crap from Anti-Vaxxers. The Biden administration is not going to put up with their lies anymore. Comes out swinging. ‘Potentially a death sentence’: White House goes off on vaccine fearmongers The administration has shifted to a head-on strategy to dispel fear-mongering over its door-to-door efforts. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/12/biden-covid-vaccination-campaign-499278 The Biden administration is casting conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme, adopting a more aggressive political posture in an attempt to maneuver through the public health conundrum. The White House has decided to hit back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics. “The big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you've got to do something that you don't want to do,” Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview on Sunday. “That's absolutely not the case, it's trusted messengers who are part of the community doing that — not government officials. So that's where I think the disconnect is.” Fauci took some of that messaging to Sunday cable news shows, including underscoring the idea that door-to-door vaccination efforts are an attempt to remove barriers to access and that 99.5 percent of deaths due to Covid are among people who are unvaccinated. “Those data kind of hits you right between the eyes,” Fauci said of the fatalities. Beyond Fauci, press secretary Jen Psaki has pushed back on Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — a lawmaker she once said she’d not mention from the podium — who compared the administration’s vaccine campaign to Nazis. Jeff Zients, the White House’s Covid response director, rebuked Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who contended falsely in a tweet that government “agents” were going door-to-door to “compel vaccination.” Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely. “We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover,” White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. “When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out.” The pushback is a change of tone and approach from earlier this year, when the White House often chose to ignore its most vocal conservative critics out of a desire not to elevate them. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the July 4 goal of 70 percent vaccination nationwide was overly optimistic, if not naive. And it underscores that two realities are setting in: It’s becoming more difficult to convince vaccine-skeptics to get their shots (of the 10 least vaccinated states, all were won by Donald Trump in 2020) and the anti-vaccine voices, already vocal in the country, are becoming more mainstreamed by Republicans eager to oppose Biden-led initiatives. Indeed, over the past few weeks, criticism of the administration’s door-to-door vaccination strategy has increasingly become a fixture on Fox News, in addition to being a top topic on conservative social media posts and over SMS messages to cell phone users. It’s coming at a time when the highly contagious Delta variant is triggering a rise in hospitalizations and infections among those who have not been vaccinated. Those who are door knocking are individuals like pastors or grassroots organizers, not government bureaucrats. And they are not delivering vaccines, but spreading the word on where and how to get vaccinated, and why it’s important to do so. To the degree that people understand that, the White House reasons, it could have a positive impact on increasing vaccinations. That hasn’t stopped conservative media figures from misrepresenting those efforts in strident, almost apocalyptic terms. Charlie Kirk, the pro-Trump co-founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, said on Fox last week that he was embarking on a “massive public relations campaign” around vaccination efforts, which he compared it to an “Apartheid-style open air hostage situation.” (Turning Point’s other founder, Bill Montgomery, died last year from coronavirus-related complications.) Turning Point USA has also sent out SMS messages urging people to sign petitions on the topic. In one message, viewed by POLITICO, Kirk contends, “Biden is sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you take a Covid-19 vaccine. Sign the petition to: No medical raids in America.” In an interview with Right Side Broadcasting during the Conservative Political Action Conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) offered a different variety of false scare tactics, suggesting that the administration would use door-to-door vaccination efforts as a means to “take your guns” and “your Bibles.” The White House didn’t respond to Kirk or Cawthorn. But after Parson sent a tweet attacking the door-to-door approach, Zients went after the Missouri governor directly. “Organizations that are feeding misinformation and trying to mischaracterize this type of trusted-messenger work, I believe you are doing a disservice to the country and to the doctors, the faith leaders, community leaders, and others who are working to get people vaccinated, save lives, and help end this pandemic,” Zients said at a news conference last week. Psaki offered a similar type of pushback on Friday, when asked about South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster’s push for the state’s Department of Health to prohibit “‘door to door’ tactics in the State’s ongoing vaccination efforts." Psaki said it was “disservice to the country” to spread the disinformation and that “the failure to provide accurate public health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country, including South Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider that.” The press secretary also pointed out that the administration has, for months, engaged with local community groups and pastors to handle the “door-to-door” sharing of information with neighbors about the vaccine. One of those groups the administration has teamed up with on the ground is the COVID Collaborative, co-founded by George W. Bush alum John Bridgeland. Bridgeland said his group had already seen a shift on the ground with people shutting doors “in their faces because they don't want to get vaccinated.” His biggest concern is that these lies convince communities [who] are already wary of the vaccines, creating sects of the country where the virus just bounces among the unvaccinated.” “It's completely illogical and it's potentially a death sentence,” Bridgeland said, adding that he’s watched the rhetoric ramp up in recent weeks. “It's being coordinated by people who have platforms and have an interest in bringing down the current administration.”
White House turns up heat on Big Tech's Covid 'disinformation dozen' https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/tech/misinformation-covid-facebook-twitter-white-house/index.html The White House turned up the pressure on Silicon Valley to get a handle on vaccine misinformation Thursday, specifically singling out 12 people one group dubbed the "disinformation dozen," saying they were responsible for a great deal of misinformation about Covid-19. "There's about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday. That statistic is from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) which identified in a report published in March about a dozen people it said were super-spreaders of anti-vaccine misinformation. The CCDH had at the time called on Facebook and Twitter to shut down all pages run by those people. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement, is among the people whom the CCDH said should be kicked off social media. Kennedy's page on Facebook-owned Instagram was shut down earlier this year for sharing Covid-19 misinformation, Facebook said. However, Kennedy is still allowed on Facebook (FB) itself, and he has more than 300,000 followers on the platform. Explaining why Kennedy was kicked off one of its platforms but not the other, a Facebook spokesperson told CNN Thursday, "We don't automatically disable accounts across our apps, because the accounts may post about different things on our different services." At the time the CCDH's report was released in March, Kennedy told NPR that he had become more cautious on Facebook, which according to NPR he also accused of censorship. "I have to post, like, unicorns and kitty cat pictures on there," he said. The CCDH said Friday that 35 social media accounts tied to the people it identified have now been shut down, losing them 5.8 million followers, but 62 accounts with a total of 8.4 million followers are still active. CNN reported Thursday that meetings between the Biden administration and Facebook have grown "tense," according to a person familiar with the conversations. The person pointed specifically to Kennedy's still-active Facebook account as an example of what some White House officials view as Facebook's inaction regarding Covid-19 misinformation. A Facebook spokesperson told CNN Friday the company had shut down some pages and groups belonging to the dozen or so people identified by the CCDH but would not say what pages. A spokesperson for Twitter (TWTR) did not immediately respond to a request for comment.