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CDC director says the definition of full vaccination could change in the future

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the definition of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 could change at some point in the future.

Walensky was asked whether the administration is reevaluating the definition of full vaccination in light of vaccine booster recommendations and whether individuals eligible for a booster should receive one in order to keep their fully vaccinated status.

“Right now we don’t have booster eligibility for all people currently,” Walensky said. “We have not yet changed the definition of fully vaccinated. We will continue to look at this. We may need to update our definition of fully vaccinated in the future. But right now what I would say is, if you’re eligible for a booster, go ahead and get your booster, and we will continue to follow.”




White House Covid-19 Response Team and public health officials hold briefing — 10/22/2021

youtu.be

Any change to the current definition of full vaccination could have far reaching consequences because existing vaccine mandates could be adjusted to require people to receive a booster dose in order to continue being considered fully vaccinated.

Individuals are viewed as fully vaccinated two weeks after receiving their second shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, or two weeks after getting a single shot of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine.

Those who received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines are eligible for a booster six months after their initial series if they are 65 or older, or at least 18 and have an underlying condition, reside in long-term care, or reside or work in a high risk setting. A booster is recommended for people 18 and above who were vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine two months ago or longer..

“There are now booster recommendations for all three available COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. Eligible individuals may choose which vaccine they receive as a booster dose,” according to the CDC. “Some people may have a preference for the vaccine type that they originally received, and others may prefer to get a different booster. CDC’s recommendations now allow for this type of mix and match dosing for booster shots.”

The CDC reports that 67% of the U.S. population ages 12 and up has been fully vaccinated. “For surveillance purposes, COVID Data Tracker counts people as being ‘fully vaccinated’ if they received two doses on different days (regardless of time interval) of the two-dose mRNA series or received one dose of a single-dose vaccine,” the CDC notes.

Vaccination of children ages 5 to 11-years-old could soon be green lighted as well.

Marine veteran wants to sue Walmart after pharmacist denied him access to ivermectin

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A retired marine from Albert Lea, Minnesota, wants to take Walmart to court after a pharmacist refused to fill his doctor’s prescription for ivermectin to treat his case of COVID-19.

Bill Salier, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Somalia and a former U.S. Senate candidate, shared his story Monday on the “Steve Deace Show,” describing how a local Walmart pharmacist refused to fulfill a doctor’s prescription for ivermectin for both him and his wife, who had each come down with COVID-19.

Salier, 53, told BlazeTV host Steve Deace that he began feeling sick on Oct. 1, and after testing he was found positive for COVID-19. After his diagnosis, Salier said he attempted to receive monoclonal antibody treatments by applying through the Minnesota Resource Allocation Platform, but his requests went unanswered.

“We never so much as heard a word back, not even in acknowledgement that the requests had been put in,” Salier said.

Failing that, Salier obtained a doctor’s prescription for ivermectin, a drug approved for use against parasites but not Food and Drug Administration authorized for use in treating COVID-19. The Biden administration, state health departments, and Merck, the manufacturer of the drug, have all warned against using it for treatment of COVID-19.

The FDA has specifically warned against the use of ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19, noting, “Currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”

“Clinical trials assessing ivermectin tablets for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in people are ongoing,” the agency said.

Nevertheless, groups like the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors have touted the drug’s benefits, claiming the Nobel-prize winning drug is very effective at treating COVID-19. Some scientists disagree, highlighting flaws in studies cited in support for ivermectin as a COVID treatment and urging people that more research is necessary before the drug should be prescribed for COVID patients.

In response, pharmacies and hospitals in the U.S. have generally followed the government’s recommendations and have denied iverrmectin to COVID-19 patients. Salier says that’s what happened to him and his wife.

“The prescription was sent in to our local Walmart, here in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and it was refused to be filled by the pharmacist. This pharmacist contacted my wife, telling her that he would not fill it. My wife stated that he did not have the right to stand between our physician’s prescription and the patent, he asserted that he did have that right and he refused to do so,” Salier said.

Salier says he and his wife were left in “limbo” after the pharmacist continued to deny them access to ivermectin, even after their physician called him to discuss the matter.

“We were faced with either continuing to suffer and quite possibly ending up in the hospital,” he told Deace, explaining that they decided to take a risk and purchased a horse paste version of the drug that is not intended for human consumption and could be dangerous if overdosed.

“I was forced with this decision and I was either going to lay there, suffer, and be at life’s peril of losing my time with my family, or I was going to eat that horse paste. And down the hatch it went,” Salier said.

Fortunately, Salier did not overdose and reported to Deace that “within eight hours” he began to feel relief from his COVID-19 symptoms.

Now, he says he wants a reckoning with Walmart and the pharmacist who denied him access to ivermectin.

“If you ever wanted to find out what it is to punch a Marine in the face and what type of response you’re gonna get, well, America, you’re about to see the type of response that you get. Because if you take on me and my family, and you stand between our physician and the health care that they have prescribed to me as a life-saving thing — in my opinion that is what it did — then you have got a fight on your hands and I am coming for that fight.”

Salier is partnering with We the Patriots USA, a nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties, to raise money to file a federal lawsuit against the pharmacist and Walmart.

Brian Festa, an attorney with We the Patriots USA, told Deace that it was “abhorrent” for the Walmart pharmacist to “play God” with the Saliers’ lives.

He observed that even the FDA acknowledges there are circumstances where health care providers prescribe certain drugs for unapproved use “when they judge that it is medically appropriate for their patient.”

“You may be asking yourself why your healthcare provider would want to prescribe a drug to treat a disease or medical condition that the drug is not approved for. One reason is that there might not be an approved drug to treat your disease or medical condition. Another is that you may have tried all approved treatments without seeing any benefits. In situations like these, you and your healthcare provider may talk about using an approved drug for an unapproved use to treat your disease or medical condition,” the FDA stated in a FAQ on its website.

“So, this is talking about off-label usage. This has been done for years,” Festa said. “We’re talking about a drug, ivermectin, that was part of a treatment protocol that won the Nobel Prize in 2015 as an anti-parasitic for malaria. This is FDA-approved, it’s been used for decades as an anti-parasitic, and now you’re suddenly telling us in 2021 that it’s unsafe because it’s being used for off-label usage? Which again, is so common in the practice of medicine.”

Festa added that the pharmacist “had absolutely no right to tell Bill and his wife that he was not going to fill this prescription” and that Walmart needs to be held accountable for what happened.

Festa said We The Patriots USA has committed $25,000 to Salier’s legal fund and that once the group raises $50,000 to cover legal fees, they will be ready to file the lawsuit.

You can listen to the interview below, beginning at the 29:47 mark:

Updated sex ed guidance will spoon-feed K-12 children explicit sexual images, gender identity, and abortion: Report

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The National Sex Education Standards’ updated 2020 guidance is featuring what many parents may consider to be disturbing, indoctrinating sex-related information that public school districts are teaching children from very young ages.

The new standards, according to the report, were conceived by the Future of Sex Education Initiative, a partnership between Advocates for Youth, Answer, and SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change that seeks to “create a national dialogue about the future of sex education and to promote the institutionalization of quality sex education in public school.”

What are the details?

According to a Tuesday report from the Federalist‘s Nick Bell, the sex education “blueprint” is steeped in “extremist sexual ethics” that are “designed to destroy children’s innocence” as well as undermine their Christian faith.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a 2016 report noted that approximately 40% of school districts across the country adopted the National Sex Education Standards’ 2011 edition — a less extreme version of its 2020 successor.

“The 2020 standards unequivocally endorse abortion at any time, teach the topic starting in sixth grade, and even force teachers to provide information on local abortion clinics to students in ninth grade,” Bell wrote. “The standards also insist that children must be allowed to choose their own gender and false pronouns must ‘be respected by the adults in their lives.'”

According to the new standards, children as young as kindergarten age should learn about gender identity, while third-grade students should learn about the role of hormone blockers for transgender youth. Teachers should also be equipped to explain masturbation to students as young as just eight years old.

It gets worse from there: Bell noted that sixth-graders — who are often 11 and 12 years old — “must define oral, anal, and vaginal sex as well as the benefits of withdrawing one’s penis before ejaculation during intercourse.”

Sixth-graders, the groups said, should also learn that people ought not “assume that people with a penis are boys and people with a vagina are girls,” and that they should never assume another person’s sexual orientation. Students of this age group, according to the guidance, should also attend LGBTQ rallies and challenge themselves and others on ways to combat homophobia. Sixth-graders would also engage in a card game in which cards ask whether various sex acts — “oral sex (mouth on genitals),” “anal sex (penis to anus)” — are considered abstinence.

For seventh-graders, anything but “sperm in vagina” would constitute abstinence, the guidance added, and teachers would demonstrate how to put on a condom.

A lesson for eighth-graders, the guidance added, would encourage anal and oral sex over vaginal sex in order to avoid pregnancy.

What else?

The new standards, according to the organization, were “written with a trauma-informed lens; have been infused with principles of reproductive justice, racial justice, social justice, and equity; address social determinants of health and how these can lead to inequitable health outcomes; and take an intersectional approach. This edition uses less cis and heteronormative language that reflects a broader range of relationships and identities.”

The updated standards also appear to place parental consent on the back burner and encourage children to demand respect from the adults in their lives when it comes to sexual choice.

“No one else is qualified to label or judge another person’s sexual identity, including their sexual orientation or gender identity, and it is important that the language and terms young people use to identify themselves is respected by the adults in their lives,” a portion of the report added.

‘The Chinese CDC Went Dark on Their U.S. Counterparts’

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Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C, July 2, 2020. ( Saul Loeb/Reuters)

You already knew that the Chinese government was spectacularly unhelpful and secretive in the pivotal early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. You probably suspected that any book about the pandemic written by former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb was going to be insightful and illuminating.

But you probably didn’t know how Gottlieb could, in a matter of paragraphs, perfectly illustrate the culpability of the Chinese government in how COVID-19 went from a virus spreading around Wuhan to a global plague that has killed, so far, more than 4.7 million people. Page 48 of Gottlieb’s new book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic:

[On] January 1, CDC Director Robert Redfield emailed his Chinese counterpart, Dr. George Fu Gao, a virologist and immunologist who had served as director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2017.  After receiving no response, later that day Redfield called Gao to press for more information. By January 3, the two had talked multiple times about the outbreak. The following day, on January 4, Redfield sent Gao another e-mail, again entreating for more information on the situation in Wuhan and requesting that the U.S. CDC staff be given access to the hot zone.

“I would like to offer CDC technical experts in laboratory and epidemiology of respiratory infectious diseases to assist you and China CDC in identification of this unknown and possibly novel pathogen,” Redfield wrote. Gao was emphatic that there was no person-to-person transmission and no evidence of spread within hospitals. Gao’s working theory was that the virus had been spread by contact with an animal, still unidentified, at the Huanan market. All the early cases seemed to be tied to that market. But Gao had sent Redfield a list of the first twenty-seven cases that the Chinese CDC had identified, and Redfield noticed that among them were three clusters where multiple family members were affected – a husband and wife, or a child and a parent. It seemed implausible that to Redfield that multiple members of three different families had all contracted the virus from one zoonotic exposure. Redfield told Gao he was extremely worried this was evidence of human-to-human transmission, urging Gao to look aggressively through local medical admissions for people with matching respiratory symptoms who didn’t identify the food market as a common point of contact.

Two days later, [January 6] Redfield sent another note, this time attaching a formal letter offering support of the U.S. CDC. Gao called Redfield back and cried during the phone call, telling Redfield that they might be too late to stop a larger epidemic. Gao had broadened his search for cases, and based on Redfield’s suggestion, expanded the “case definition” he was using to include people with matching respiratory symptoms but who didn’t necessarily report having any contact with the food market suspected as a source for the outbreak. Now, Gao was finding many more cases that seemed to be caused by the same pathogen. The infection appeared widespread.

Redfield believed Gao and other health authorities in Beijing were unaware of the outbreak until late December. Prior to that time, U.S. officials believe the information was being held by provincial officials, and perhaps the Chinese military, but not shared with central health officials in Beijing. If the U.S. had been able to get its own CDC staff on the ground when they made their first request, Redfield believes the U.S. would have uncovered the evidence of asymptomatic spread. That information could have changed the structure of the American response.

It wasn’t just Gao who was giving Redfield and U.S. health officials the cold shoulder. As the scope of the outbreak grew, information sharing contracted. Across different levels of the U.S. and Chinese CDCs, where there had previously been regular contact among lower-level officials, the Chinese CDC went dark on their U.S. counterparts. And it wasn’t just the U.S. CDC that was having problems getting access to information in China. Gao was having his own problems inside his own country. His investigators had been rebuffed by local authorities in Wuhan. “They didn’t show him all the cases,’ said Dr. Ray Yip, the U.S. CDC’s former China liaison, of the Wuhan authorities. “They had a couple of cases of hospital workers infected by then, and that’s obviously human-to-human, how else did they get it?” Yip said.

The question of whether this virus emerged from a lab leak is supremely important, but it has obscured the equally scandalous and horrific facts that are known and indisputable. Chinese authorities in Wuhan and later in Beijing knew they were dealing with a dangerous and contagious virus, and instead of warning the world, chose to allow contagious carriers to travel around the world. The Chinese government did not admit the virus was contagious until January 21. By then, it was far too late; cases had been reported in Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, and the virus was spreading, undetected, all around the world.

This raises the uncomfortable question of whether something that was not designed as a bioweapon can become the functional equivalent of a bioweapon, when it is knowingly spread to other countries.

David Asher is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, and in 2020, he served in the State Department advising and supporting investigations into nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons proliferation. At State Department, he spearheaded a task force for the Office of the Secretary of State, looking at the origins of COVID-19 and the role of the Chinese Communist government.

At a recent Hudson Institute event, Asher noted, “almost any major lab in the world could create a bioweapon, unfortunately. It really comes down to if something was released in a form of a potential pandemic pathogen, whether it was covered up or not. They certainly in China weaponized this virus, however it arrived on the face of the earth, by covering up, not just its origin, but the fact that it was spreading and could spread asymptomatically human to human, and they did it for months.”

Study Success, Not Just Failure

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A man receives the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose at Skippack Pharmacy in Schwenksville, Pa., August 14, 2021. (Hannah Beier/Reuters)

The adage about those who don’t know history being doomed to repeat it is suspect because it implies that there is nothing in the past that’s worth repeating. There certainly is plenty of bad stuff we don’t want to repeat, and knowing the past is important. But why isn’t there a saying about those who don’t know history being unable to have the good fortune of repeating it?

Operation Warp Speed was one of those things we should want to be able to repeat. Yet, as Alex Tabarrok points out today at Marginal Revolution, it’s mostly “a story yet to be told.”

“Operation Warp Speed was by far the most successful government program against COVID,” Tabarrok writes, and it’s hard to disagree. You could argue he’s actually understated in his praise. It might be one of the most successful government programs, period. The success in treating COVID is undeniable, but that may only be the start of Operation Warp Speed’s positive effects. If the seeds that government helped plant for mRNA vaccines eventually blossom into better flu vaccines and new cancer treatments, it would be the best use of 18 billion taxpayer dollars in American history. Plus, it was an exception to the rule about “temporary” government programs: Operation Warp Speed achieved its goal and was disbanded in February of this year.

While the full effects of the program remain to be seen, there’s still plenty to be learned from its successes so far. Tabarrok mentions the uncharacteristic speed with which the bureaucracy acted, the lifting of regulatory hurdles, and the nature of the public–private partnerships as subjects worthy of further study. The media, however, insist on nonstop doom and gloom in COVID coverage. “We know a lot about CDC and FDA failure but in order to know what we should build upon we also need to know what worked,” Tabarrok writes.

Yuval Levin touched on this issue as well in his cover piece for the September issue of Commentary. “We will have trouble learning lessons from our pandemic experience because we live in a time of unremitting negativity about America on all sides of our culture and politics,” he writes. “All we can see is what is wrong with our country, and you can’t learn much if you aren’t willing to acknowledge successes alongside failures.”

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The doomsayers will always have the upper hand in public discourse because if you don’t go along with the doom, you’re seen as dismissing people’s suffering. But ignoring the good and obsessing over the bad will only create more suffering in the future if it means we fail to learn what worked. That’s especially true if the bad news isn’t accurate. “False bad news is a very real social pollution, and a dangerous one,” wrote the economist Julian Simon. We’ve seen that social pollution time and again during the pandemic, whether it was the Provincetown outbreak-that-wasn’t or the Rolling Stone article about Oklahoma hospitals overrun by people who took veterinary-dosage ivermectin.

It seems we now have the technology and capability to mass-manufacture highly adaptable vaccines that can be deployed against many diseases and save countless lives. And, much as it may pain some of us to say it, it seems that the federal government deserves some of the credit in making that possible. The Left is hesitant to give any praise to Operation Warp Speed lest it look like praise for Donald Trump. Many on the right are hesitant, too, lest they be seen as praising big government. (Operation Warp Speed was not big government: $18 billion is a drop in the ocean of federal spending, and the payoff was in the trillions when you consider the lives saved and the resumption of economic activity.)

Everyone would be wise to put aside their partisan hang-ups and call Operation Warp Speed what it was: a success. We’d also be wise to stop letting incessantly negative media coverage tinge our view of the United States’ response to COVID. We should want to know everything about how Operation Warp Speed worked so we can implement lessons from it in other government programs and be able to repeat it when necessary in response to any future pandemics.