For all the people trying to claim the percentage of minorities vaccinated are a lot less than whites -- it ain't true anymore. You will have to take your MAGA narrative somewhere else. While at the same time you should recognize the largest unvaccinated cohort in number in the U.S. are white Republicans -- far exceeding any other group in size. White House touts success in vaccinating African Americans, Latinos https://news.yahoo.com/white-house-...ting-african-americans-latinos-202743688.html The White House is publicizing new findings that suggest the months-long effort by federal, state and local public health officials to reach African Americans and Latinos is showing the intended results, with coronavirus vaccination rates for those groups on par with that for white Americans. “We know our work isn’t done, but this is important progress,” said Jeff Zients, the White House pandemic response team coordinator, during a Tuesday briefing. Zients cited a recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation that shows near-identical vaccination rates across ethnic groups: 71 percent for white Americans, 70 percent for African Americans and 73 percent for Latinos. Since the pandemic began, social and economic inequality have only exacerbated the ravages of COVID-19, leading some to describe it as a “racial pandemic.” When vaccines first became available, a racial gap also emerged, leading some to worry that people of color would be left out of the vaccination drive. “There were many reasons for this gap, including barriers to vaccine access, and some still had concerns about the safety, the efficacy, of the vaccines,” said Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a health equity expert at Yale University who is a member of the White House coronavirus task force, at Tuesday’s briefing. “And those concerns were often rooted in misinformation,” she said, an apparent reference to falsehood-ridden outreach campaigns to Black communities by anti-vaccine advocates who preyed on the history of institutional racism to build a dubious case against the coronavirus vaccine. Nunez-Smith noted that a Pew Research Center survey of 10,000 adults, as well as a survey of 19,000 adults by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yielded results hewing closely to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s findings. “It’s very, very encouraging to see,” she said. Some have criticized the administration’s focus on equity, arguing that an age-based approach would have been speedier. The administration countered by saying that it would be fast and fair, offering incentives and partnering with Black churches and hair salons, among other institutions. Later, the Biden administration instituted vaccination mandates, which have affected millions of public- and private-sector employees. Encouraging signs that the racial vaccination gap was closing appeared in the summer. Yet even as that gap closes, the overall vaccination campaign is now seeing the lowest daily uptake since the Biden presidency began.
And now you and your cohorts can stop claiming that the percentage of minorities vaccinated in the U.S. are greatly less than whites. There goes that fabricated talking point by the MAGA crowd.
In regards to Gibraltar-- the country had zero COVID cases in mid-May. The country opened itself to tourism on June 13th. After this COVID cases among the residents grew -- but it should be noted that nearly none of the vaccinated needed to be hospitalized. There is is lesson in all of this about opening your country for tourism without strictly quarantining those incoming with 14 day quarantines. Out of 40,000 people in their population with an adult vaccination rate of over 99% of residents they only had 29 breakthrough infections reported each day. Nearly all of them associated with contacts of cases incoming from tourists post June 13th (when tourism opened up); back in mid May they were at zero cases. Gibraltar is effectively open without restrictions. It should be noted that none of the vaccinated residents with COVID required hospitalization (thanks to being vaccinated). It is only the small population of Gibraltar leading to a high rate when the raw number is only 29 infections on average per day -- with nearly all of them employed in tourism. The bottom line: Breakthrough cases among the vaccinated will occur -- especially when you start bringing in a large number of tourists -- including unvaccinated tourists. Fortunately the vaccinated adult residents are likely only to endure mild cases. Facts and context matter.
COVID vaccine disinformation a big reason behind low inoculation rates, officials say https://www.latimes.com/california/...e-disinformation-behind-low-inoculation-rates
President Biden: It's time for an urgent and effective plan to vaccinate the world https://thehill.com/opinion/white-h...for-an-urgent-and-effective-plan-to-vaccinate In a recent open letter to President Biden, signed by over 50 global health leaders and more than a dozen eminent public health organizations, we called on the president to vaccinate the world. He’s already donated or pledged a total of more than 1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses and provided funding to support COVAX (a global partnership to accelerate equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines). While laudable, President Biden’s charitable donations and piecemeal approach fall far short of the leadership the world urgently needs. At a side session of the United Nations General Assembly, Biden set a target of vaccinating 70 percent of the world by next September. But he’s never presented a plan that meets the moment. The world needs President Biden’s plan and needs him to act on it now. Here’s a bold plan Biden should adopt. But first, the public might ask, why is it our responsibility to help vaccinate the world? The answer is that the U.S. and other wealthy countries caused global inequalities by signing pre-purchase agreements with vaccine manufacturers, paying premium prices to snatch up the lion’s share of the vaccine supplies. We used domestic laws to restrict the export of doses and a vaccine supply chain, so even highly capable manufacturers in middle-income countries could not produce vaccines to scale. Now many rich countries are giving third dose “boosters,” sometimes available to large swaths of the — or even the entire — population, while more than 97 percent of people in lower-income countries have not received even a single dose. All the while, COVAX has been sidelined. And it’s very much in our national interests to boost global vaccine coverage to prevent more dangerous variants from coming back to haunt us, even with our more than ample vaccine supplies. After all, the “variants of concern” — those Greek letters that endanger us, including the Delta variant that stole our summer solace — all originated elsewhere, in places where transmission will go unchecked in the absence of vaccines. President Biden’s donations are only part of the remedy, though perhaps the fastest way to get some doses where they are most urgently needed. But donations are a bandage, not a cure. They won’t enable the world to contain SARS-CoV-2 — or to save millions of lives and energize the global economy. Joined by leading figures in global health, we have laid out six elements that should be central to the administration’s response. First, given how urgent the need is for more doses in lower-income countries, Biden should donate the hundreds of millions of surplus doses the United States is likely to have by year’s end to countries where they are most needed. And the president should accelerate the timeline for donating the billion Pfizer doses he has pledged. Second, and with the same aim, the U.S. should permit COVAX and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to move ahead of the U.S. in COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers’ queues. Third, COVAX also needs more funding. Biden should provide the lion’s share of COVAX’s 2022 budget, working with Congress if additional appropriations are required. Fourth, fundamentally, the world needs far more vaccine doses. The mRNA vaccines can and should be quickly scaled up to produce at least 8 billion doses annually, along with scaling up other safe and highly effective vaccines. An increased COVID-19 vaccine production capacity will not only speed vaccination but will also create enough supply for booster shots as the evidence warrants for people everywhere. Even more critically, it will enable rapid, equitable, global vaccination if current vaccines need to be modified to protect us from new SARS-CoV-2 variants able to evade current vaccines. While we should increase U.S. production, the only sustainable global solution is to empower vaccine production globally. This will require extensive technology transfer, technical assistance, and funding to help establish robust mRNA and other COVID-19 vaccine production hubs in all regions, including support for the WHO-backed mRNA hub in South Africa. The long era of people in poorer countries left to the whims of wealthier countries for life-saving medical technologies must end forever; regional COVID-19 vaccine production at scale would be a critical start. President Biden should require Pfizer and Moderna to scale up their production and transfer their know-how to vaccine producers in low- and middle-income countries. While U.S. government contracts can provide significant leverage, the president should not hesitate to use emergency powers under the Defense Production Act. Legislation introduced in Congress, the NOVID Act, which has broad Democratic support, would authorize $25 billion to scale up vaccine production and technology transfer. Much as the United States established the groundbreaking global AIDS program, the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to enable people in even the poorest countries to access AIDS antiretroviral medication, Biden should lead a similar initiative — only on a vastly accelerated timeline — for COVID-19 vaccines. Fifth, sufficient vaccine supply alone is insufficient to achieve high levels of coverage. Vaccine delivery and administration infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries require billions of dollars in support to enable countries to strengthen cold chains for vaccine storage and transport, train vaccinators, develop the necessary data systems, identify high-risk populations and develop extensive education campaigns to combat vaccine hesitancy. The NOVID Act would authorize $8.5 billion for these purposes. The president should call for, and Congress appropriate — through emergency supplemental legislation if necessary — the NOVID Act’s entire $34 billion authorization. And sixth, the shared global targets resulting from last month’s Global COVID-19 Summit that president Biden hosted are a good start but mean little without a shared global plan to achieve those targets and save the most lives. The president should now spearhead that plan, collaborating with WHO and other partners. For starters, it should aim to achieve at least 80 percent global vaccination, including across even low-income countries. The 70 percent target is too low given the risk of further highly transmissible variants. The plan should include clear actions, commitments, metrics and milestones to ensure that further vaccine supplies are distributed equitably and go first where they are most urgently needed and that all countries have needed vaccine delivery and administration support. Failing to finally move towards vaccine justice will delay the end of this pandemic and mean more dangerous variants, imperiling us all. Justice and U.S. self-interest overlap. President Biden must act now for the sake of all of us.
How Puerto Rico became the most vaccinated place in America https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/24/us/puerto-rico-covid-vaccination-rate/index.html "Best I can tell, they've done this largely by not tying vaccines to politics," Jha wrote last weekend. "They pay less attention to mainland politics. All their political parties actively support vaccinations. And generally, political [identity] & vaccinations are not intermixed."
Biden admin plans COVID-19 vaccine production blitz Biden administration aims to produce an additional 1B doses per year https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/biden-covid-vaccine-blitz The Biden administration will reportedly invest billions of dollars into expanding the domestic production of COVID-19 vaccines. The move is intended to build manufacturing capacity, with the goal of producing an additional one billion doses per year. A senior health official from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told FOX Business on Wednesday that the administration was prepared to offer vaccine manufacturers who have demonstrated the capability to make mRNA vaccines substantial government resources to help expand infrastructure and capacity. Vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna currently produce the two U.S.-approved mRNA vaccines. The official noted that, in the short term, the plan would make a significant amount of COVID-19 vaccine doses available at cost for global use. In the long term, they said it would help to establish sustained domestic manufacturing capacity in order to prepare for any future threats. The official said the administration hopes that companies will take it up on the plan and aid in the effort to get more people around the world vaccinated against COVID-19. This comes after World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the G-20 Summit in Italy that the world needs another 550 million doses to reach the organization's goal of vaccinating 40% of every country by the end of the year. Additionally, earlier in the fall, President Biden said the U.S. aims to send an additional 500 million COVID-19 vaccines around the world, bringing the total doses donated to other nations to more than 1.1 billion. Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. had negotiated a deal to deliver Johnson & Johnson vaccines to conflict zones and for 300,000 doses to be made available to United Nations front-line workers. A State Department spokesperson told Fox News then that the department was aware of the urgency of the fight against the pandemic and that they could not disclose where the doses would be distributed, with the aim of protecting the safety of the vaccine providers, recipients and other humanitarian personnel working in conflict zones. There are no firm agreements yet with Moderna or Pfizer to take up the U.S. on the investment, but the administration hopes that the enhanced manufacturing capacity will be available by mid-2022. "This is about assuring expanded capacity against Covid variants and also preparing for the next pandemic," Dr. David Kessler, who oversees vaccine distribution for the administration, told The New York Times, which first reported the news, on Wednesday. "The goal, in the case of a future pandemic, a future virus, is to have vaccine capability within six to nine months of identification of that pandemic pathogen, and to have enough vaccines for all Americans." Kessler said that the cost of the public-private partnership remains uncertain, but the money has been set aside as part of the American Rescue Plan. The HHS referred FOX Business to the solicitation, including the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency's (BARDA) "request for information." The Times noted that White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said that officials wanted responses "in a very short period of time, 30 days, to understand how most efficiently, effectively and reliably we can increase manufacturing."
Yeah, Biden has done a wonderful job. GWB-Faking spreads mis-information. It is that simple. COVID CASES USA 265,032 DEC 23 2021 193,511 DEC 23 2020