Fauci: Tell COVID I’m Not Your Stepping Stone!
America appeals to the vaccine-hesitant while the world begs for shots. In the meantime, variants gain ground and the IHME recounts the dead.
Fully vaccinated since March, we have had some wonderful, almost surreal, moments of late. I got the chance to hug my dad, aged 91, for the first time in more than a year. I’ve been able to visit with my mother-in-law, 95, without wearing a mask. My wife and I visited with family over the Memorial Day weekend (there was a beautiful cake with the lovely message: We’re All Vaccinated!).
Most wonderfully, we’ve traveled to see our grandchildren.
It feels so natural to be together, and I had to keep reminding myself how long it had been — and how lucky we are, in context of how people are dealing with the pandemic around the world. We forget quickly and move on. Such is human nature.
Local restaurants may be packed, shops may be busy, ballparks may be filled, many of us may be on the road — but this thing is not over. There’s still much work to do.
On the good news side of the ledger, one can jot down that the United States overall has a chance to reach the Biden administration’s goal of 70% vaccinated by July 4. At the time of this writing, some 63% of all American adults have received at least one dose (51% are fully vaccinated), but results may vary depending on your state of residence.
Twelve states have reached or exceeded 70% vaccination rates for their populations. Some states are being creative in trying to coax the vaccine hesitant to get the shot — most prominently Ohio with their “Vax-a-Lot” lottery. Companies like Uber and Lyft stepped up early, offering free rides to vaccinations. Anheuser-Busch wants to buy everyone in the country a beer if we step up and meet the 70% goal.
Back in March, I wondered how we might appeal to those who for ideological reasons refuse to get the vaccine. (If I may say so, my own favorite was an ad campaign “Join a Worthy Insurrection — Against COVID-19!”) Reportedly, at least some of those folks have since quietly gotten vaccinated — as quietly as the former president and first lady did before they departed the White House.
On the other hand, quite a few states have no chance to make that goal and at least 15 state legislatures have enacted new rules to limit the power of public health officials to set mask mandates, close or limit businesses, or even suggest other measures to mitigate health issues. (Those facts would go on the other side of your ledger, if you’re still in that jotting mood.)
Watching Republican state legislators work to limit public health officials in much the same way they are limiting voting rights, I am reminded of the cartoons in Highlights for Children magazine with the characters Goofus and Gallant in which children were taught how to best behave.
Gallant listens to health officials in a pandemic and wears his mask in all public places.
Goofus rarely wears a mask during the pandemic, and when he does he keeps it below his nose. Goofus says mask mandates are a tyranny. Goofus is a total tool.
Reading Highlights in my youth, I never imagined that Goofus would grow up to be a member of a state legislature, even a member of the U.S. Congress. And for complex reasons — much having to do with the legacy of Rush Limbaugh — we have a whole lot of Goofuses in political positions (I nearly wrote “public service” but caught myself) around the country. At the state level, Republican politicians are baking in the catastrophic Trump Administration response to the pandemic, one that experts say cost us hundreds of thousands of lives more than it might have had the response been quicker and more based on science and the advice of health experts.
The Biden administration has pledged to send 80 million doses of U.S. vaccines to countries in need by the end of June, to be distributed globally by COVAX. And the G7 countries have now pledged to purchase and send 1 billion doses to nations in need, with the United States providing 500 million. It’s late coming, and variants, recently renamed by the World Health Organization with Greek letters, have increased infection rates in India, the U.K., and elsewhere, but nonetheless this is good news.
And while we personally are generally following the more relaxed guidelines, there is a feeling that the CDC was somewhat bullied into opening up the country. This is not to say that I don’t trust the vaccines, because I do; it’s trusting in others — mostly, the politicized anti-maskers — to do the right thing that stops me short.
Doing the right thing, the public-minded thing, from the beginning has been centered on appropriately wearing masks and getting vaccinated as soon as possible, in order to lessen the opportunities for variants of the virus to develop and spread into the population. Dr. Fauci appearing on the MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” where he spoke with host Nicolle Wallace and appealed to people, especially the young, to get vaccinated to “be a dead end to the virus”:
“We almost plead with people to get vaccinated because it is ironic — and in many respects tragic — when you have hundreds of millions of people in other regions of the world who are begging for vaccines. We have all the vaccines we need; we just need our people to take it, for their own protection, for the protection of their family, but to also break the chain of transmission. Because there’s this feeling, “Well, I’m young, I’m healthy — if I get infected the likelihood of my having any symptoms is low. So, who cares?” You should care because if you get infected and you’re not vaccinated, there’s a chance — maybe a likelihood — that you will be part of the dynamics of the continuation of the chain of transmission…. Now, I don’t think anyone would intentionally want to be part of the transmission chain. You want to be a dead end to the virus, so when the virus gets to you, you stop it. You don’t allow it to use you as a stepping stone to the next person.”
Speaking of young people, in the United States some 2.5 million, aged 12 to 16, have been vaccinated so far.
As countries struggle to get supplies of vaccine, the number of those who have died as a result of COVID-19 appears to be much higher than has been reported.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) method for counting the COVID mortality numbers changed last month, from reported deaths to estimated total deaths. As explained on their website, estimated total deaths takes into account six factors caused by the pandemic itself, such as excess deaths, underreporting by governments, reluctance to seek medical help, and mental health issues leading to death. By that modeling (three of the six factors would actually lower the numbers), global deaths resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic stand at 7.7 million, and more than 930,000 have died in the United States. (When the IHME stopped publishing reported deaths, on May 23, the U.S. number was 586,000 and global reported deaths were just under 3.5 million.) As they write, we will never know the actual numbers, but their estimates appear to better reflect the lives lost due to the pandemic.
To put those numbers into some perspective, the CDC estimates that some 50 million people worldwide, including 680,000 people in the United States, died as a result of the 1918 influenza pandemic. The relative numbers for the 2020 pandemic for the United States — a wealthy country in a much more scientifically advanced era, a country that often boasts about having the best healthcare systems — do not look good. In fact, they look terrible.
Still, there is reason to be hopeful as we move toward the goal of 70% by July 4. (There’s free beer on the line, Americans!)
But with the Delta variant likely to make its presence known in the United States soon, we would all do well to remember Dr. Fauci’s words: “You want to be a dead end to the virus, so when the virus gets to you, you stop it.”
