#vaccine rollout

[cowboylikedean]

I wonder how olivia feels about it. Like if the haylor implication becomes mainstream news it could really hurt her. Plus she already went through hell during dwd promo.

depending on your reading and interpretation, it's possible taylor called olivia "what's suitable" so i imagine she's probably pissed

#that said olivia wilde is a bitch #and like i don't say that with misogyny #i say that with honesty #she is irredeemable to me and always will be #since she said that she pushed and fought to get dwd production to start before the vaccine rollout and before the studio felt it was safe #because #and i quote #'it was important we make this now' #evil #so idc if she's pissed or has had a hard time

[sirfrogsworth]

People are talking about not voting for Biden.

Again.

I'm just so tired of this argument.

I just can't do Trump again.

I can't.

His incompetence killed so many people. A panel estimated 40% of COVID deaths could have been averted.

One of those deaths was my mother.

She was killed because people didn't trust the vaccines and they didn't think masks were worth the inconvenience. That man could have gone on TV and said "This is the Trump vaccine and it is great." He could have sold fucking MAGA masks on his website. He had 100% influence over his dipshit followers and could have used that for the greater good. But he was too vain to wear a mask in public and bungled the vaccine rollout.

And now I worry some of my trans loved ones may not make it through another far right administration. They have this giant target on their back right now and conservatives seem determined to eradicate as many trans lives as possible.

I wrote a whole ass post about how I didn't care for Biden. I still don't. But when I try to imagine what a right wing administration would be doing right now... that seems like it would be a nightmare orders of magnitude worse than the current nightmare.

As someone with an untreatable chronic illness, I know the feeling of being presented with choices where all of them suck. And I have had to survive by choosing the least sucky option over and over.

It feels bad every single time.

I hate it.

And I still fucking choose.

It should be different. There should be better choices. I shouldn't have to choose the least bad thing among all bad things.

But there are people and things in this world I feel are worth sticking around for, so I continue to choose the least sucky thing.

[thoughtportal]

Opinion Here’s how to get free Paxlovid as many times as you need it

When the public health emergency around covid-19 ended, vaccines and treatments became commercial products, meaning companies could charge for them as they do other pharmaceuticals. Paxlovid, the highly effective antiviral pill that can prevent covid from becoming severe, now has a list price of nearly $1,400 for a five-day treatment course.

Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, Americans can still access the medication free or at very low cost through a program called Paxcess. The problem is that too few people — including pharmacists — are aware of it.

I learned of Paxcess only after readers wrote that pharmacies were charging them hundreds of dollars — or even the full list price — to fill their Paxlovid prescription. This shouldn’t be happening. A representative from Pfizer, which runs the program, explained to me that patients on Medicare and Medicaid or who are uninsured should get free Paxlovid. They need to sign up by going to paxlovid.iassist.com or by calling 877-219-7225. “We wanted to make enrollment as easy and as quick as possible,” the representative said.

Indeed, the process is straightforward. I clicked through the web form myself, and there are only three sets of information required. Patients first enter their name, date of birth and address. They then input their prescriber’s name and address and select their insurance type.

All this should take less than five minutes and can be done at home or at the pharmacy. A physician or pharmacist can fill it out on behalf of the patient, too. Importantly, this form does not ask for medical history, proof of a positive coronavirus test, income verification, citizenship status or other potentially sensitive and time-consuming information.

But there is one key requirement people need to be aware of: Patients must have a prescription for Paxlovid to start the enrollment process. It is not possible to pre-enroll. (Though, in a sense, people on Medicare or Medicaid are already pre-enrolled.)

Once the questionnaire is complete, the website generates a voucher within seconds. People can print it or email it themselves, and then they can exchange it for a free course of Paxlovid at most pharmacies.

Pfizer’s representative tells me that more than 57,000 pharmacies are contracted to participate in this program, including major chain drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens and large retail chains such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco. For those unable to go in person, a mail-order option is available, too.

The program works a little differently for patients with commercial insurance. Some insurance plans already cover Paxlovid without a co-pay. Anyone who is told there will be a charge should sign up for Paxcess, which would further bring down their co-pay and might even cover the entire cost.

Several readers have attested that Paxcess’s process was fast and seamless. I was also glad to learn that there is basically no limit to the number of times someone could use it. A person who contracts the coronavirus three times in a year could access Paxlovid free or at low cost each time.

Unfortunately, readers informed me of one major glitch: Though the Paxcess voucher is honored when presented, some pharmacies are not offering the program proactively. As a result, many patients are still being charged high co-pays even if they could have gotten the medication at no cost.

This is incredibly frustrating. However, after interviewing multiple people involved in the process, including representatives of major pharmacy chains and Biden administration officials, I believe everyone is sincere in trying to make things right. As we saw in the early days of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, it’s hard to get a new program off the ground. Policies that look good on paper run into multiple barriers during implementation.

Those involved are actively identifying and addressing these problems. For instance, a Walgreens representative explained to me that in addition to educating pharmacists and pharmacy techs about the program, the company learned it also had to make system changes to account for a different workflow. Normally, when pharmacists process a prescription, they inform patients of the co-pay and dispense the medication. But with Paxlovid, the system needs to stop them if there is a co-pay, so they can prompt patients to sign up for Paxcess.

Here is where patients and consumers must take a proactive role. That might not feel fair; after all, if someone is ill, people expect that the system will work to help them. But that’s not our reality. While pharmacies work to fix their system glitches, patients need to be their own best advocates. That means signing up for Paxcess as soon as they receive a Paxlovid prescription and helping spread the word so that others can get the antiviral at little or no cost, too.

{source}

#article #washington post #Paxlovid #covid #pandemic #health

[navree]

at the risk of sounding blasé (which i hate to do but it is a risk),

you did not "lose two years and counting" to covid, you lost a year, at most a year and a half. and that ended in 2021. which WAS two years ago

#personal #like covid became a widespread problem in the US in march (early march i believe) 2020 #by march 2021 the vaccine rollout for the general population had already started #(seriously i moved to washington state in march 2021 and was so disappointed to see that vaccines were only getting rolled out there) #(in late april/early may cuz that was a LOT later than most other states were doing it) #like it's still absolutely possible to get covid and for it to even give you symptoms #i got covid in july of 2022 and lemme tell you it WAS a nightmare i had to go on a ten minute walk and i thought i was gonna die #but if you're vaccinated and have kept up to date on the boosters (all of which by the way are entirely fucking free and very easy to get) #it feels like a nasty case of the flu and then you're good #and if you're not vaccinated......well sorry you're just stupid and should either get the jab or resign yourself to misery/potential death #and that's not on my conscience #so anyway yeah no you are not losing half a decade to covid unless you don't understand math or the linear progression of time

[giorgio52fan]

Uncertain Horizon: Will the COVID School Years Return Amid New Variants?

The relentless specter of COVID-19 continues to cast a shadow over the education landscape. As the world grapples with the ever-evolving variants of the virus, the question on everyone’s mind is whether the COVID school years will return. Despite the optimism of public health officials and the reassurances regarding the efficacy of tests and vaccines against new variants, a critical examination…

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#Booster shots #COVID school years #Education landscape #Educational implications #Emerging variants #Health authorities #Highly mutated variant #Immunity and vaccinations #New COVID variants #Pandemic response #Pandemic trajectory #Personalități românești #Prevalence and spread #Public health measures #Public health officials #Symptoms and severity #Testing effectiveness #Testing landscape #Uncertainty and challenges #Vaccination rollout #Vaccination strategies #Vaccine efficacy #Variants&039; impact #Viral mutations and evolution #Virus mutations #Vulnerability and adaptation

[triviallytrue]

let's fucking go

[rtoffanin]

Federal officials are not relying on an established system to distribute the vaccine, slowing immunizations and burdening local health departments, critics say.

BY APOORVA MANDAVILLI | NYTimes Health | Disclosure

#News Updates #‘Frustration and Stress’: State Officials Fault Rollout of Monkeypox Vaccine

[kevinwillpkgd]

#Fifth Toronto-area doctor dies two weeks after the rollout of the fourth COVID vaccine #The series of five deaths began just two days after the province of Ontario expanded fourth COVID dose eligibility to all citizens over age

[airbrickwall]

#´covid haiti #covid vaccines #New Zealand mortality rate #stop the rollout

[gumjrop]

You might be forgiven for thinking it’s been a very quiet few months for the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides the rollout of new boosters, the coronavirus has largely slipped out of the headlines. But the virus is on the move. Viral levels in wastewater are similar to what they were during the first two waves of the pandemic. Recent coverage of the so-called Pirola variant, which is acknowledged to have “an alarming number of mutations,” led with the headline “Yes, There’s a New Covid Variant. No, You Shouldn’t Panic.”

Even if you haven’t heard much about the new strain of the coronavirus, being told not to panic might induce déjà vu. In late 2021, as the Omicron variant was making its way to the United States, Anthony Fauci told the public that it was “nothing to panic about” and that “we should not be freaking out.” Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s former Covid czar, also cautioned against undue alarm over Omicron BA.1, claiming that there was “absolutely no reason to panic.” This is a telling claim, given what was to follow—the six weeks of the Omicron BA.1 wave led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in a matter of weeks, a mortality event unprecedented in the history of the republic.

Indeed, experts have been offering the public advice about how to feel about Covid-19 since January 2020, when New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo opined, “Panic will hurt us far more than it’ll help.” That same week, Zeke Emanuel—a former health adviser to the Obama administration, latterly an adviser to the Biden administration—said Americans should “stop panicking and being hysterical.… We are having a little too much [sic] histrionics about this.”

This concern about public panic has been a leitmotif of the Covid-19 pandemic, even earning itself a name (“elite panic”) among some scholars. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned, three and a half years into the current crisis, it’s that—contrary to what the movies taught us—pandemics don’t automatically spawn terror-stricken stampedes in the streets. Media and public health coverage have a strong hand in shaping public response and can—under the wrong circumstances—promote indifference, incaution, and even apathy. A very visible example of this was the sharp drop in the number of people masking after the CDC revised its guidelines in 2021, recommending that masking was not necessary for the vaccinated (from 90 percent in May to 53 percent in September).

As that example suggests, emphasizing the message “don’t panic” puts the cart before the horse unless tangible measures are being taken to prevent panic-worthy outcomes. And indeed, these repeated assurances against panic have arguably also preempted a more vigorous and urgent public health response—as well as perversely increasing public acceptance of the risks posed by coronavirus infection and the unchecked transmission of the virus. This “moral calm”—a sort of manufactured consent—impedes risk mitigation by promoting the underestimation of a threat. Soothing public messaging during disasters can often lead to an increased death toll: Tragically, false reassurance contributed to mortality in both the attacks on the World Trade Center and the sinking of the Titanic.

But at a deeper level, this emphasis on public sentiment has contributed to confusion about the meaning of the term “pandemic.” A pandemic is an epidemiological term, and the meaning is quite specific—pandemics are global and unpredictable in their trajectory; endemic diseases are local and predictable. Despite the end of the Public Health Emergency in May, Covid-19 remains a pandemic, by definition. Yet some experts and public figures have uncritically advanced the idea that if the public appears to be tired, bored, or noncompliant with public health measures, then the pandemic must be over.

But pandemics are impervious to ratings; they cannot be canceled or publicly shamed. History is replete with examples of pandemics that blazed for decades, sometimes smoldering for years before flaring up again into catastrophe. The Black Death (1346–1353 AD), the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD), and the Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD), pandemics all, lacked the quick resolution of the 1918 influenza pandemic. A pandemic cannot tell when the news cycle has moved on.

Yet this misperception—that pandemics can be ended by human fiat—has had remarkable staying power during the current crisis. In November 2021, the former Obama administration official Juliette Kayyem claimed that the pandemic response needed to be ended politically, with Americans getting “nudged into the recovery phase” by officials. It is fortunate that Kayyem’s words were not heeded—the Omicron wave arrived in the US just weeks after her article ran—but her basic premise has informed Biden’s pandemic policy ever since.

Perhaps even less responsibly, the physician Steven Phillips has called for “new courageous ‘accept exposure’ policies”—asserting that incautious behavior by Americans would be the true signal of the end of the pandemic. In an essay for Time this January, Phillips wrote: “Here’s my proposed definition: the country will not fully emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic until most people in our diverse nation accept the risk and consequences of exposure to a ubiquitous SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.”

This claim—that more disease risk and contagion means the end of a disease event—runs contrary to the science. Many have claimed that widespread SARS-CoV-2 infections will lead to increasingly mild disease that poses fewer concerns for an increasingly vaccinated (or previously infected) population. In fact, more disease spread means faster evolution for SARS-CoV-2, and greater risks for public health. As we (A.C. and collaborators) and others have pointed out, rapid evolution creates the risk of novel variants with unpredictable severity. It also threatens the means that we have to prevent and treat Covid-19: monoclonal antibody treatments no longer work, Paxlovid is showing signs of viral resistance, and booster strategy is complicated by viral evolution of resistance to vaccines.

But these efforts to manage and direct public feelings are not just more magical thinking; they are specifically intended to promote a return to pre-pandemic patterns of work and consumption. This motive was articulated explicitly in a McKinsey white paper from March 2022, which put forward the invented concept of “economic endemicity”—defined as occurring when “epidemiology substantially decouples from economic activity.” The “Urgency of Normal” movement similarly used an emotional message (that an “urgent return to fully normal life and schooling” is needed to “protect” children) to advocate for the near-total abandonment of disease containment measures. But in the absence of disease control measures, a rebound of economic activity can only lead to a rebound of disease. (This outcome was predicted by a team that was led by one of the authors [A.C.] in the spring of 2021.)

A pandemic is a public health crisis, not a public relations crisis. Conflating the spread of a disease with the way people feel about responding to that spread is deeply illogical—yet a great deal of the Biden administration’s management of Covid-19 has rested on this confusion. Joe Biden amplified this mistaken perspective last September when he noted that the pandemic was “over”—and then backed that claim by stating, “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” The presence or absence of health behaviors reveals little about a threat to health itself, of course—and a decline in mask use has been shaped, in part, by the Biden administration’s waning support for masking.

Separately, long Covid poses an ongoing threat both at an individual and a public health level. If our increasingly relaxed attitude toward public health measures and the relatively unchecked spread of the virus continue, most people will get Covid at least once a year; one in five infections leads to long Covid. Although it’s not talked about a lot, anyone can get long Covid; vaccines reduce this risk, but only modestly. This math gets really ugly.

The situation we are in today was predictable. It was predictable that the virus would rapidly evolve to evade the immune system, that natural immunity would wane quickly and unevenly in the population, that a vaccine-only strategy would not be sufficient to control widespread Covid-19 transmission through herd immunity, and that reopening too quickly would lead to a variant-driven rebound. All of these unfortunate outcomes were predicted in peer-reviewed literature in 2020–21 by a team led by one of the authors (A.C.), even though the soothing public messaging at the time called it very differently.

As should now be very clear, we cannot manifest our way to a good outcome. Concrete interventions are required—including improvements in air quality and other measures aimed at limiting spread in public buildings, more research into vaccine boosting strategy, and investments in next-generation prophylactics and treatments. Rather than damping down panic, public health messaging needs to discuss risks honestly and focus on reducing spread. Despite messages to the contrary, our situation remains unstable, because the virus continues to evolve rapidly, and vaccines alone cannot slow this evolution.

In the early months of the pandemic, many in the media drew parallels between the public’s response to Covid-19 and the well-known “stages of grief”: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. The current situation with Covid-19 calls for solutions, not a grieving process that should be hustled along to the final stage of acceptance.

#op #covid #covid19 #covid 19 #covid-19 #covid isn't over #coronavirus #pandemic #public health #wear a mask

[acwellness]

COVAX urges better vaccine rollout in lower-income countries

COVAX urges better vaccine rollout in lower-income countries

The COVAX program to speed and equitably deliver COVID-19 vaccine to low- and middle-income countries has enough vaccine supplies, but demand for shots is low and some countries are struggling to launch campaigns, a situation that requires urgent action, the group said today. The call to close the vaccine gap, which has a goal of protecting 70% of populations in 91 lower-income nations, comes as…

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#AC Wellneess #countries #COVAX #health updates #latest health news #lowerincome #rollout #urges #Vaccine

[vomitdodger]

So many examples they had to invent the name “turbo cancer”. Stage 1 to 4 in a matter of months or diagnosed at advanced staging. You’d think this is something the medical system as a whole would investigate but no.

They invented the term SADS (Sudden Adult Death Syndrome) almost immediately after vax rollout to explain all the “died suddenly and doctors are baffled”.

You’d think all major medical institutions, policy makers, academic societies, etc would AT LEAST question all this and cause for a contemplative and investigative pause.

Nope. It’s just not talked about. Totally ignored. Meanwhile the cdc still pushes it and added the toxic vax to the childhood vaccines list.

There’s a select few speaking out. Florida Surgeon General being an example. He gained some brief notoriety then faced the social media shutdown as expected. FLCCC being a long standing opponent of anything Covid related being another. No traditional medical entity will entertain them.

Is it any wonder that confidence in medicine is at a all time low?

Sad state of affairs. Gonna get worse.

[random-thought-depository]

#science #medicine

[reality-detective]

Courageous San Francisco nurse Gail McCrae has tales to tell about the shocking 3 fold increase in hospitalisations/deaths she witnessed directly associated with the vaccine rollout.

Staff were warned not to report on adverse events and unfortunately most complied.

Gail was fired from her job and taken out of her graduation program for speaking out.

Her story deserves to be heard!!! 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think for yourselves #think about it #think for yourself #do your homework #ask yourself #ask yourself questions #do your own research #research everything #do some research #question everything #the truth shall set you free

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Ontario residents who are six months and older will be able to receive their free flu shot and the new COVID-19 vaccine starting on Monday.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced the immunization program rollout on Sunday, saying people should make sure they are up to date on their vaccinations to stay safe and healthy during the season when respiratory illnesses typically surge.

Full article

Note: This is in effect as of October 30th

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #canada #canadian politics #canadian news #canadian #vaccines #vaccination #ontario #flu vaccine #flu shot #coronavirus vaccine #COVID-19 vaccine #healthcare #flu #coronavirus #COVID-19 #flu season