The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 194 (694)

A British scientist who was knighted in 2014 for service to medical statistics said that he did not take the pandemic seriously enough when it began. He then added that an analysis he did shows that the pandemic has been a lifesaver for younger people. It seems that 300 fewer people between the ages of 15 and 30 died during 2020 than would have been expected to die even including the 100 that died from covid. Young people were not driving (too fast) or drinking or in general going out. The scientist did concede that this was not necessarily a good thing. Maybe this is a very thin silver lining to the cloud of the pandemic. Or maybe it isn't.

France, Spain, and Denmark will require visitors who finished their vaccination cycle over 270 days ago to have gotten a booster or they will be considered unvaccinated. Austria has a similar rule with the time limit set at 180 days. As might be expected, children are going to be a sticking point. For example, children under age 12 cannot yet be vaccinated in the UK. The situation reflects something of a "jigsaw puzzle of restrictions" one with which some travel agents don't want to deal.

The US trails eight other high-income countries--Belgium, Britain, Germany, Netherlands, France, Canada, Sweden, and Australia--in the share of the population who have gotten booster shots. Fourteen percent of Americans over the age of 65 who are eligible for boosters had not gotten one as of mid-January. The US also sits well above those other eight countries in terms of the number of deaths per capita. As an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard's school of public health put it, "For a country which has a vaccines-only strategy, we're not very good at vaccination."

A scientist at Oxford University who worked on the AstraZeneca vaccine says that scientists and politicians damaged the vaccine's reputation and "probably killed hundreds of thousands of people" adding that, "They damaged the reputation of the vaccine in a way that echoes around the rest of the world." Because the AstraZeneca vaccine has yet to be authorized for use in the US, I don't know that much about it. I will say, though, that what I have read about the various vaccines available around the world, I might have been more comfortable getting AstraZeneca than Johnson & Johnson.

Australia will open to all fully vaccinated visa holders including tourists on February 21. Visa holders who are not fully vaccinated will face quarantine requirements and need to have received a travel exemption. This will not actually open all of Australia to visa holders and tourists given that states control their own borders and can impose their own requirements.Western Australia, for example, will continue to control tightly who can enter. 

Looking for an exemption from vaccine requirements? Online documents are readily available. One online "ministry" provides a letter from an "ordained Pastor" for only $195. They call it part of a vaccination "concierge program." Dr. Fauci continues to draw the ire of Republicans. Mehmet Oz, otherwise known as Dr. Oz, is running for the US Senate in Pennsylvania and wants to debate not his opponent in the primary but Dr. Fauci. And the governor of Florida is supporting the sale of "Freedom over Fauci Flip-Flops." It gets a wee bit weirder every day.