Once again the Associated Press Morning Wire email contained no coronavirus news. And the only coronavirus news in CNN's 5 Things email was under the heading "Texas." The news there could have legitimately been listed under the state or the virus, but because there was other state news given, "Texas" was probably more appropriate. What happened in Texas related to the coronavirus? How about the governor's issuing an executive order prohibiting any entity, including a private business, from enforcing vaccine mandates. He also wants the state legislature to make this into a law. Now, my question is whether the law would be specific to coronavirus vaccine mandates or to all vaccine mandates including those of children entering school. I raise this question because the governor said that "...vaccines are strongly encouraged for those eligible to receive one, but must always be voluntary for Texans." Meanwhile, the death toll in Texas is nearing 70,000. I think that makes it about 10 percent of the nationwide death toll.
Dr. Fauci continues to remark that vaccines are crucial, with about one-fourth of the eligible US population still not vaccinated. In fact, more boosters are being given currently than first doses. Countries worldwide are instituting some form of vaccine mandates almost daily. They're just not good enough for Texas, I guess.
The question has been raised of whether an unvaccinated child is more at risk from covid than a vaccinated 70-year-old. Seattle releases some of the most detailed covid death data in the country. In those data it appears that the risks for unvaccinated children are roughly the same as for vaccinated people in their 50s. Data from England suggest that children under 12 appear to be at less risk than vaccinated people in the 40s. In other words, in terms of risk reduction, vaccinations are more valuable for older adults than they are for younger adults.
What does this say about requiring vaccinations for children? Most American parents of small children are between the ages of 25 and 39; only 55 percent of this group are vaccinated themselves. Three different polls yield similar results. The first reported that over half of parents of children between the ages of 3 and 11 said that they were unlikely to get them vaccinated. A second reported that only 26 percent of parents would vaccinate children between the ages of five and 11 "right away." Finally, the third reported that over 40 percent of parents of elementary- and middle-school-aged children would definitely not get them vaccinated unless it were required by school of for other activities.
In biological terms, coronaviruses are relatively stable; they mutate, for example, more slowly than influenza. In terms of mutations, there are three things you don't want to see: the virus's becoming more transmissible, better at evading an immune response, or becoming more virulent. The Alpha variant was 50 percent more infectious that the original coronavirus; the Delta variant is 50 percent more infectious than the Alpha variant. However, covid vaccines are more effective than flu vaccines may ever have been. The author of "The End of Epidemics," a global health expert holds that the future "depends much more on what humans do than on what the virus does."
Look at the last bit again. The future depends on what we do, not on any variants the coronavirus throws at us. We are in charge, in other words. I repeated early on that we were fucked by the virus. It might be better at this point to say that we can fuck this up all on our own. We don't need any help form the virus. It's all on us.
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