Vaccination

How the CDC misled America about vaccination rates

According to the calculations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 92.2 percent of American adults have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. But a new report published this month found that as many as one in four Americans have never received a shot. The finding casts doubt on the role that vaccines played in getting the pandemic under control, and further incriminates the CDC’s pandemic response, undermining its trustworthiness. The report was prepared by the Covid States Project, a joint initiative of Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University. They surveyed almost 25,000 people across all fifty states and DC with state-level representative quotas for sex, age, and race.

rochelle walensky mask

The United States of Fear

We recently left the country for the first time since the pandemic began. I could say that we’d always wanted to go to Iceland, but the truth is, we’d wanted to go to Iceland ever since we heard how sanely they handle visitors. Even at the height of the pandemic in 2020, they didn’t require COVID tests for children. They still don’t. Iceland is the world’s most vaccinated nation, with 86 percent of the country having gotten the jab. A recent ‘spike’ (they peaked at 170 cases per day in mid-August) led to an indoor mask mandate, but it doesn’t apply to kids. The mandate is also very loosely enforced. There are no Karens shrieking at people to mask up in shops, and I saw many unmasked Icelanders indoors.

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The return of measles and the age of idiocy

Measles, a disease considered eliminated in 2000, is now rampaging through the country. The causes of this latest outbreak are symptomatic of what ails our society: a slavish devotion to celebrity, the elevation of emotion over facts, the failure of science and math education, the rejection of evidence, and the inability to discern authoritative sources from a crackpot behind a keyboard. Our national health relies on Americans understanding the difference between peer-reviewed research and a discredited study, just as our political health demands that we distinguish between fake news and reliable sources with attributed quotes, between research and facts and garbage.

measles