Cody Meissner brought anti-vax and Great Barrington Declaration nonsense to the FDA’s ACIP
(This is crossposted from my substack newsletter: Restricting vaccine access because of anti-vax bullshit or waiting for hospitals to overflow is unethical )
Nobody should be basing vaccine access on financial focus, right-wing politics, hopium, perceived administrative inconvenience, nor anti-vax disinformation.
Vaccine policy should not be a political football and leaders should not be prioritizing The Economy over human lives like they’re in some kind of cult doing human sacrifice. Please join me in writing to U.S. representatives to demand scientific and ethical access to vaccines. Write your own letter, or use mine, use parts of it for your own, or use my form, or send it whatever way you would like to, such as directly to the White House. My letter to my reps:
Everyone in America needs access to vaccine boosters more than once a year. Vaccine policy should be based on science and protecting human lives, not the economy or a political football or corporate nonsense. Scientific evidence indicates the vaccine should ideally be allowed, available, and fully covered by public funds or insurance, twice a year. Restricting access endangers everyone, and especially those already in higher risk and already in jeopardy. Stop allowing anti-vax politically based misinformation to restrict access to desperately needed healthcare interventions, especially when the vaccine was one of the dwindling mitigations still implemented by those in positions of power. We should not be denied timely boosters. Give us the boosts!
Basing vaccine access on waiting for hospitals to overflow is unethical
ACIP wants to see more hospitalizations to prove prevention is needed. At the ACIP meeting in February 2023 it came out that they don’t want to prevent hospitalizations, they want to wait and see if older adults will overload the hospitals, before allowing boosters. Katelyn Jetelina, paid communication consultant for the CDC), who apparently is still waiting for “stars to align” on the vaccines, reported on her substack that ACIP came to the conclusion they would only change in the future based on increased hospitalization rates among the boosted and other signals of waning of this last round of boosters, and if SARS-COV-2 “significantly mutates.”
SARS-COV-2 is mutating all the damn time! Evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace called the omicron subvariants this past winter “a veritable zoo in a golden age of Omicron evolution.”
ACIP apparently cited “insufficient evidence” that the hospitals will fill with bivalent booster recipients, but the reality is that there is not sufficient proof that boosters wane any differently than the previous boosters and there is definitely not sufficient public health measures to restrict access to vaccines!
What happened to the precautionary principle in public health decision making?
It’s unethical and way too late to wait and see if hospitalization rates among those who got the bivalent start to increase before allowing us access to timely boosters based on previous science showing waning efficacy. Hospitals are already backed up and over stressed so flattening some curve is less than the bare minimum. But even if this was the thinking, it’s immoral to set the bar so low and needlessly restrict a life saving medical intervention for individuals, especially people with the so-called “certain medical conditions” that up the covid risks.
It’s not okay that ACIP says it’s fine because there is still room at the hospital. David Rubin and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia made this same argument about letting the virus spread in schools in Philadelphia in 2021, because there was room at CHOP’s ICU after all. This does not make sense. People don’t want to get sick and need the hospital.
What’s next? Medical recommendations based on the capacity of freezer truck morgues? The fact that the Biden administration reportedly broached the subject of some amount of acceptable deaths makes me concerned about a slippery slope we’ve been sliding down where we are abandoning even the most basic infectious disease mitigations known in the Dark Ages.
There is scientific evidence about booster efficacy time frames
Scientists say that covid vaccination provides the best protection against the virus for about the first 4 months after getting the shot. There are no guarantees, and the protection is limited, but as one blogger put it, “the lived reality for many Americans is they need that protection as limited as it is because they have been abandoned. You can’t make vaccination the centerpiece of your COVID (sort of) prevention strategy, and then not let people access it.”
The CDC’s own presentation at the ACIP meeting in September 2022 included a chart that showed protection waning by 6 months and essentially no protection from symptomatic infection by 8 months. There is still benefit in regards to death and hospitalization after 8 months but that of course diminishes over time too.
Last year, Kristian Anderson, an immunologist at Scrippts told the Washington Post that “people need to be boosted every 6 months or so.”
Epidemiologist Rob Wallace posted a public comment for the People’s CDC to the FDA’s proposal for once a year covid vaccination condemning “constraining vaccination to once a year” as a “further handcuff” on the public health response to the pandemic, which is damaging on top of dropping NPIs. The People’s CDC urged the public to comment because “the vaccine should ideally be allowed, available, and fully covered by public funds or insurance, twice a year.”
A study published in January 2023 “strongly supports boosting on an annual or more frequent cycle to markedly diminish the long-term risk of infection.”
Peter Hotez told NPR that “people as young as 50 should be able to get a second bivalent booster if they want one.”
Mike Osterholm told Stat News that he thinks “people who are 50 and older in the U.S. should be offered the chance to get a second booster” this spring because in the second half of 2022, 97.3% of people who died from covid were over 50.
Osterholm also noted that the bivalent uptake is so low that it would hardly cause vaccine providers to be overwhelmed. I think it’s cute how Mike Osterholm still tries to assume logical explanations and bureaucratic excuses rather than the obvious anti-public health right-wing extremism going on at public agencies.
Anti-Vax Great Barrington herd death wishes should not influence vaccine policy
It’s egregiously nonsensical to allow an incoherently anti-vax doctor connected to Scott Atlas & Joe Ladapo, to continue to botch the vaccine strategy. Scott Atlas was at the center of a Congressional inquiry on missteps in the pandemic, and Joe Ladapo is the Florida surgeon general who spread vaccine disinformation. Cody Meissner also signed the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which basically called for unfettered disease spread. The herd immunity nonsense has even evolved over time with adherents like Sunetra Gupta calling for “constant reinfection” of the herd. Constant reinfection inevitably leads to herd death, large numbers of people put six feet under, because some portion of people infected die, and it’s not always predictable, there are people who die of covid with no pre-existing conditions, this was especially true before vaccines were available and will surely be true again if vaccines are withheld.
It’s really no joke. The anti-vax extremists mean business. People mistakenly believe these right-wing extremist covid minimizers and pandemic deniers are merely anti-mandate, but there’s no evidence they’re stopping there. The anti-vax movement has disrupted vaccine centers, so why wouldn’t you expect them to remove access to vaccines for everyone? They’re doing it right now. In some cases they’re calling for state action against public health officials based on lies and vaccine disinformation, often conspiracy fodder pumped out by well-funded right-wing think tanks like The Norfolk Group.
Someone, reportedly from the FDA speaking on condition of anonymity to the Washington Post, said that they don’t want to have to formulate better vaccines because they believe the public has “little interest in getting repeated injections.” The anti-vax terminology used there for periodic shots speaks volumes. And it reflects following the politics in a way that’s incredibly discriminatory against the many high risk people who have been vaccinated, and want to continue getting vaccinated to save our lives.
Also, if it’s merely about capitulating to people who don’t want to get vaccines or boosters, why do they want to restrict vaccine access for everyone else? It seems to me that this is a scheme to stop people from getting vaccinated. To vaccinate less. This only makes sense if you want to push “natural infection” upon people. Which will kill some people, and disable more. We know that the anti-vax movement is absolutely related to “natural herd immunity” fantasies. And we know that Cody Meissner buys into that stuff because he signed The Great Barrington Declaration and he continues to blather on about the boggling concepts from those people.
And even Paul Offit, also at CHOP, and long time proponent of vaccines, now echoes bullshit “focused protection” ideas from the Great Barrington Declaration, where he claims that young healthy people should get infected instead of getting vaccinated. And the WHO “went so far as to suggest countries could also choose to forgo offering a primary vaccination series to healthy children and adolescents” — suggesting “healthy children” should not be protected from the infections with vaccination… for some reason. The SAGE report couches it in a desire to appease economic concerns which is problematic all on its own.
All of this anti-vax extremism is well outside reality and yet these outrageous ideas are being normalized and embraced. Or at least capitulated to it. And they have an unusual focus on “healthy children” getting “natural infections” that really gestures at all the anti-vax natural herd immunity eugenics ideas.
The overton window has shifted so far to the right. Last year a Harvard professor of epidemiology might tweet out a periodic reminder that it’s chill that some number of people will suffer or die. Nowadays a former Harvard professor of epidemiology is posting a tweet thread that lays out explicitly a eugenics scenario, as if it’s a given that babies born today will get infected with covid four times per year for the next 50 years, and suggesting the survivors might be better off. No mention of the many preventable deaths in the process.
Mike Osterholm, epidemiologist and Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota, in an interview with Stat News said: “We currently live in a world where those that want additional booster doses really want them. And those that don’t want them don’t want them at all. And what we’re trying to do is thread that needle.” But why do we need to thread the needle between reality and disinformation?
Why do we have to compromise with anti-vaxxers and meet eugenicists halfway? Halfway to herd death is not a direction where I want us to point our moral compass.
Vaccine boosters are a hell of a lot better than hopium
Mike Osterholm was recently infected with covid for the first time after being denied another bivalent booster, which he attempted to get 6 months after his first, based on the science.
People are at risk.
Basing the covid vaccine booster schedule on a desire by some for the pandemic to fade into just a seasonal cull of the marginalized and a background level of old poor people dying prematurely, that some white people believe they can largely ignore, is based in political disinformation that covid risks don’t apply to the them. But covid risks apply to everyone, and the range of risks are substantial and range from problematic to deadly, it’s not entirely predictable. The vaccines have been shown to reduce the risks. Most people don’t have several weeks or months per year to spend sick with covid, and most Americans don’t have several weeks of paid sick leave to cover that, especially not low wage workers. And that’s just the life disruptions before you consider the immediate and long-term health risks of long covid and hospitalization. The risk of death also still remains: 2,060 people died of COVID nationally the week of March 22, 2023. Political consultants can claim that yearly boosters sound like good propaganda, but most people are going to feel tricked and angry when they’re sick again, lose jobs, get hospitalized, or their loved ones die needlessly because they weren’t allowed to get a timely booster.
This idea that anti-vax people are suddenly going to be lining up for boosters because they’re more spaced out is nonsensical. That’s not how vaccine drives work. Offering less vaccines does not get more people vaccinated. This fantasy that anti-vaxxers are suddenly going to want a boost because they were told they only need one per year is ridiculous hopium. Or it’s just a lie — more anti-vax bullshit trying to trick people who want to get vaccinated into not getting a booster, or in this case actually bar them from getting a booster. It’s the same kind of illogical garbage argument they used to get people to unmask in 2021, by promising vaccinated people if they unmasked the anti-vax people would see the light and get vaccinated, and in reality everyone just unmasked and spread the virus.
Basing vaccine access on the green cast Community Levels Hospital Map
The CDC decided to set aside the covid transmission maps, likely because they were always lit up bright red all over the country and it was politically inconvenient. They put forward the “Community Levels” map which had more pastel shades of green and it is based on hospitalizations. But if people go to the hospital for surgery, and they get a hospital acquired covid infection, how does that get counted? We don’t even know about it because that information is being “kept private.”
Financial priorities considered over human health is not medical guidance
One would expect that the World Health Organization would make medical recommendations based on the facts that impact human health and human lives. However, the guidance put out by SAGE is quite clear in stating that their guidance is based instead on the “health spending priorities” of nations. In fact SAGE specifically says nations should make these decisions based on health spending priorities.
Shouldn’t WHO be putting people over profits? Why would doctors issue medical guidance this way? A healthcare organization should always recommend what’s best for human lives, and allow people and their governments to explain and justify why they’re defying the guidance. WHO should not exist to run political cover for anti-vax fascism or neoliberal austerity that harms the poorest. SAGE defends their politically oriented guidance by stating: “SAGE is in the business of having to give global recommendations.” This seems like an endorsement of denying vaccines to poorer countries, (or the poor in rich countries taken over by a right-wing anti-vax cult).
People deserve more than just enough medicine allowed to keep The Economy not too disrupted
The FDA is not saying you don’t need the vaccine more than yearly — they admit openly that the data shows that yearly would be “just enough frequency to prevent huge outbreaks.”
This is not a vaccine schedule to protect human life and health. It’s a vaccine schedule to just do “good enough” (they hope) to keep from having disruptions that are big enough to inconvenience the movers and shakers. And the Washington Post reports that the FDA hopes that the lowest level of protection will be in the summer — when they figure surges are less severe. People still get sick and die in the summer. But they don’t seem to want to prevent us from dying, they just don’t want too many deaths so as to require unsightly freezer truck morgues or disrupt supply chains. As Robert Evans put it on the It Could Happen Here Podcast, “People like us worry will my community & I survive & people like them worry will I lose power?”
Administrative convenience, lazy leaders, and doctors who think patients are stupid, all refuse to mount an effective vaccine drive
This scientifically unsupported restriction to having just a yearly vaccine is reportedly a vaccination schedule to make it easier for simplistic geriatricians who feel like they need to talk down to their patients instead of doing the work of communication that will save lives and prevent suffering.
This isn’t medical science. It’s prioritizing administrative conveniences over human health. And the people at the FDA are putting the blame on the patients for being stupid, anti-vax, or otherwise not interested in saving our own lives.
Rob Wallace stated in his public comment to the FDA on the vaccine schedule: “Do not operationalize an intervention that’s based on blaming unvaccinated Americans for that fiasco.” But that’s exactly what they have done — the government and many doctors interviewed by the media on this subject do not seem at all motivated to actually do a proper vaccine drive. They appear to have little interest in saving the lives of individuals or preventing suffering by explaining to patients the benefits of vaccination, or the risks of not getting boosted. This is absolutely doing harm.
Following the politics is not medical care and people know that
There’s been a noticeable push to say the virus is not a big deal, even though that’s not true, and people know that, such as Jim Lertola who told the Washington Post in a letter to the editor: “The pandemic is not over, and our leaders need to say so.”
And if politicians and their political appointees declare the emergency over to please fossil fuel interests & anti-vax proponents pressuring against mitigations, the problem doesn’t go away. It just festers. So then they try to normalize negative outcomes. But manufacturing doubt only gets you so far. You can’t fool all the nurses. The essential workers are being sacrificed on the altar of The Economy and right-wing interests when a 63 year old covid survivor nurse is being denied a timely booster, and people know it.
Where are the ACIP whistleblowers?
A couple years from now The New York Times perhaps will tell a story how anti-vaxxers at ACIP prevented people from getting boosters timely and how people there feel bad over it like the people now reporting what went wrong for them at the CDC in spring 2020. But then it’ll be too late for the people who get covid and whatever consequences that could’ve been mitigated by a booster they were denied now.
Between the anti-vax contingent, and possibly scientists who like the idea of yearly shots because it makes study data more tidy and easier to use, I’m very concerned. Even tardy half-measures would be an improvement at this point. The CDC continues to drop the ball on covid spread and covid information and covid prevention and covid mitigation — to this day. They’re not even addressing hospitals following the anti-mask anti-vax politics and just stopping infection control.
Infrapolitics at American pharmacies
I’m hearing that people are just lying to get their boosters. When the politics fail, infrapolitics become a method of protest and survival. It’s completely understandable. Though it’s hardly great for tracking vaccinations both at a population level, and doctors having accurate patient histories.
Americans shouldn’t have to lie to get a vaccine booster.
Other countries are not restricting boosters this way. Canada is not just offering, but recommending a spring booster for seniors and Canadians with underlying conditions.
But why restrict the vaccine boosters at all? Why restrict them specifically from “healthy young people” when there are clear benefits for everyone to stay healthy with the boost?
