Levin writes: "One of the most frustrating aspects of many conservatives' refusal to follow the advice of health experts when it comes to COVID-19 is that they don't want to wear masks or social distance, they're demanding that life go back to normal, and yet they won't do the most important thing when it comes to putting the pandemic behind us, i.e. get the damn vaccine."
Anthony Fauci is director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (photo: Getty)
ALSO SEE: COVID-19 Misinformation Is a Public Health Hazard -
We Need to Start Treating It as Such
22 July 21
The coronavirus is almost exclusively killing the unvaccinated.
ne of the most frustrating aspects of many conservatives’ refusal to follow the advice of health experts when it comes to COVID-19 is that they don’t want to wear masks or social distance, they’re demanding that life go back to normal, and yet they won’t do the most important thing when it comes to putting the pandemic behind us, i.e. get the damn vaccine. So, you’ll have to excuse Anthony Fauci (and the rest of the Joe Biden administration) if they’re at-the-end-their-ropes piqued with what we would never dare call, but someone slightly less decorous might, these selfish mother-f--king idiots.
Appearing on CNN on Saturday—one day after Biden said social media companies like Facebook are “killing” people by allowing vaccine misinformation to spread, a critique he later clarified by saying he meant that about a dozen of Facebook’s users are killing people with misinformation—Fauci said if the world had had to deal with these anti-science pundits in years past, it never would’ve made it out alive. Asked by Jim Acosta if he thought “we could have defeated the measles or eradicated polio if you had Fox News, night after night, warning people about these vaccine issues that are just bunk,” Fauci responded, “We probably would still have smallpox, and we probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now.”
“We probably would still have smallpox and we probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that's being spread now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci says about misinformation surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. https://t.co/ahhu3MpCuY pic.twitter.com/IPEB5Bym0V
— CNN (@CNN) July 17, 2021
Fauci, of course, has been the right’s arch nemesis since the very start of the pandemic, thanks to the fact that he represents all the things they despise (science, multiple degrees), and not only told people what to do in the midst of a global health crisis, but displayed a treasonous level of disrespect by not blindly agreeing with every single thing Donald Trump said about the virus, never once telling reporters, “Actually, I think injecting bleach into your veins is a great idea and I’m personally going to try it tonight.” All of which would just be another day in GOP crazy town if not for the fact that literal lives are at stake. Which, of course, they are.
In an analysis published on Monday, The Washington Post showed that the coronavirus is surging among the unvaccinated, particularly where the “more contagious, more powerful” delta variant has gained a foothold.
The adjusted rates in several states show the pandemic is spreading as fast among the unvaccinated as it did during the winter surge. Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada, and Louisiana all have coronavirus case spikes among the unvaccinated, with adjusted rates double or triple the adjusted national rate.
“We are on an exponential curve,” said Mark Williams, dean of the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “The delta variant is a different animal than the wild [original] variant. It is far more infectious and far more virulent.” Williams expects the case rate among unvaccinated people to push higher than the winter surge. “I don’t see at the minute how we can avoid it,” he said.
Like deaths, hospitalizations from COVID-19 are almost entirely limited to unvaccinated patients. When current hospital utilization is spread across only the unvaccinated population, Nevada, Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida have rates between double and triple the adjusted national rate. “Ninety-eight percent of hospitalized individuals with COVID in Arkansas are unvaccinated,” Williams said. Even though treatments are better than they were originally, a larger share of patients are ending up in intensive care, and the fatality rate for those patients remains high, experts said.
“That’s just indicative of the more virulent quality of the delta variant,” Williams told the Post. “It will make people sick, even people that are young and would not have felt any consequence from the original wild variant.” He added that “far more children are being hospitalized,” which was extremely rare until now, saying that as of the middle of July, a dozen kids were in Arkansas Children’s Hospital, and two were on ventilators. He also fears that there will be an uptick in cases in the fall in places such as Arkansas, where masks and vaccine mandates are being banned, when schools and colleges reopen. “That’s kind of like a viruses playground. There will be a lot of transmission going on,” Williams said.
“With the arrival of delta, we will have two very different epidemics—one a mild cold in vaccinated individuals, and then we continue to have deadly infections in unvaccinated individuals,” William Powderly, director of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Post. “The people who need to come to hospital, who end up in the intensive care unit, and the people who die are almost exclusively unvaccinated individuals.
But according to conservatives, vaccines are for suckers and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is a Nazi. Which, among other things, gives Nazis a lot of credit!
