Lunchtime pandemic reading.
Standard disclaimer: this is a roundup of informative pieces I've read that interest me on the severity of the crisis and how to manage it. I am not a qualified medical expert in ANY sense; at best I am reasonably well-read laity. ALWAYS prioritize advice from qualified healthcare experts over some person on Facebook.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.
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Can your office require you to be vaccinated? Under USA law, yes. "In 1902, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, faced a smallpox outbreak. In response, the local health board ordered the city’s residents over the age of 21 to be vaccinated against this disease. Violators faced a $5 fine.
After a local pastor was fined for violating this vaccine mandate, he appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court told him to pound sand in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905).
“The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for the Court. He added that “there are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.”
Under Jacobson, state and local governments — though not necessarily the federal government — may mandate vaccines for nearly all of their residents.
The bottom line, in other words, is that, under existing law, numerous institutions within the United States may require their employees — and, in some cases, their citizens — to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
Employment relationships in the United States are typically “at-will,” meaning that an employee can be fired at any time and for any reason, even if that reason is completely arbitrary. If you have an at-will relationship with your employer, your boss can fire you because they don’t like your haircut. Or because they don’t like what you had for breakfast last Tuesday.
Or, for that matter, because you refuse to get a Covid-19 vaccine.
The general rule, in other words, is that your employer can fire you for any reason unless some outside legal force — a federal or state law, or maybe an individual or collective bargaining contract between you and your employer — intervenes to give you additional job security. And there is no federal law prohibiting employers from requiring nearly all of their employees to get vaccinated.
That said, some federal laws may allow a small number of workers to seek an exemption from their employer’s decision to mandate vaccination.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, may allow people with medical conditions that prevent them from being vaccinated to gain such an exemption.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 permits people with religious objections to vaccination to seek an accommodation from their employer.
Neither of these laws prevents an employer from “requiring all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for Covid-19,” according to the EEOC’s guidance on Covid-19 in the workplace. But employees may be entitled to a “reasonable accommodation” if their religion or disability precludes them from getting vaccinated, so long as this accommodation does not “pose an undue hardship on the operation of the employer’s business.”
Some examples of reasonable accommodations that might be offered to certain employees include requiring these workers to “wear a face mask, work at a social distance from coworkers or non-employees, work a modified shift, get periodic tests for COVID-19, be given the opportunity to telework, or finally, accept a reassignment.” But not every employee will be entitled to each of these accommodations, even if they are protected by a law like the ADA or the Civil Rights Act.
The specific accommodation will depend on an individual employee’s job duties — someone who does work that can only be done at a particular job site, for example, may not be allowed to telework. And employers are not required to employ people who cannot do their job even with reasonable accommodations."
Source: https://www.vox.com/22599791/covid-vaccine-mandate-legal-joe-biden-supreme-court-jacobson-massachusetts-boss-employer
Commentary: So bottom line, even with an emergency authorization, the law clearly states that employers - and USA states - can mandate vaccination. The Jacobson case is important because the ruling was long before there was an FDA.
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WHO asks people to hold off on boosters. "The head of the World Health Organization called Wednesday for a moratorium on administering booster shots of COVID-19 vaccines as a way to help ensure that doses are available in countries where few people have received their first shots.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the appeal mostly to wealthier countries that have far outpaced the developing world in numbers of vaccinations. He said richer countries have administered about 100 doses of coronavirus vaccines for every 100 people on average, while low-income countries — hampered by short supplies — have provided only about 1.5 doses per 100 people.
WHO officials say the science is unproven about whether giving booster shots to people who have already received two vaccine doses is effective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus."
Source: https://apnews.com/article/health-coronavirus-pandemic-united-nations-0e7636c1bcf61e70d9e61ce70300aa78
Commentary: Here's the thing with vaccines. They need to be used. A dose that doesn't get administered is disposed of, and it's a complete waste. So, if a locale has doses, it should use them in the unvaccinated. Barring that, if it can ship them somewhere else doses are needed, it should do that. And if that's not possible due to regulatory or legal hurdles, then use them as boosters because that's better than just throwing them away.
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Lambda may have higher resistance and Delta's infectivity. "SARS-CoV-2 Lambda, a new variant of interest, is now spreading in some South American countries; however, its virological features and evolutionary trait remain unknown. Here we reveal that the spike protein of the Lambda variant is more infectious and it is attributed to the T76I and L452Q mutations. The RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation, a unique 7-amino-acid deletion mutation in the N-terminal domain of the Lambda spike protein, is responsible for evasion from neutralizing antibodies. Since the Lambda variant has dominantly spread according to the increasing frequency of the isolates harboring the RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation, our data suggest that the insertion of the RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation is closely associated with the massive infection spread of the Lambda variant in South America."
Source: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.454085v1
Commentary: The next battleground will be immune resistance. There are enough vaccinated people now that the virus is facing selection pressure for mutations that can evade immune responses. This is why it's so important to get everyone on the planet vaccinated - every person infected is a chance for a new mutation to spring up, and the worst possible situation is a hefty mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated, because that gives the virus many, many more chances to evolve into something that evades immune responses.
And we are in the worst possible situation right now.
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A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wear the best mask available to you when you'll be around other people, even after you've been vaccinated. Respirators are back in stock at online retailers, too. Wear an N95/FFP2/KN95 that's NIOSH-approved or better mask if you can obtain it. If you can't get an N95 mask, wear a surgical mask with a cloth mask over it.
2. Verify your mask's NIOSH certification here: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/usernotices/counterfeitResp.html
3. Get vaccinated as soon as you're able to, and fulfill the full vaccine regimen. Remember that you are not vaccinated until everyone you live with is vaccinated. If you received an adenovirus vaccine (J&J/AstraZeneca), consider getting an mRNA single shot booster (Pfizer/Moderna) if permitted.
4. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home.
5. Stay out of indoor spaces that aren't your home as much as practical. Minimize your contact with others and avoid indoor places as much as you can; indoor spaces spread the disease through aerosols and distance is less effective at mitigating your risks.
6. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
7. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
8. Ventilate your home as frequently as weather and circumstances permit, except when you share close airspaces with other residences (like a window less than a meter away from a neighboring window).
9. Masks must fit properly to work. Here's how to properly fit a mask:
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Common misinformation debunked!
There is no basis in fact that COVID-19 vaccines can shed or otherwise harm people around you.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-covid19vaccine-reproductivepro-idUSL1N2MG256
There is no mercury or other heavy metals in the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/09/1013538/what-are-the-ingredients-of-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine/
There is no basis in fact that COVID-19 vaccines pose additional risks to pregnant women.
Source: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104983
There is no genomic evidence at all that COVID-19 arrived before 2020 in the United States and therefore no hidden herd immunity:
Source:
There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, nor that it escaped a lab somewhere.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debunk-fringe-theory-linking-chinas-coronavirus-weapons-research/
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/anthony-fauci-no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd/
Source: https://www.smh.com.au/national/are-we-ignoring-the-hard-truths-about-the-most-likely-cause-of-covid-19-20210601-p57x4r.html
There is no evidence a flu shot increases your COVID-19 risk.
Source: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/
Source: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa626/5842161
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Disclosures and Disclaimers
I declare no competing interests on anything I share related to COVID-19. I am employed by and am a co-owner in TrustInsights.ai, an analytics and management consulting firm. I have no clients and no business interests in anything related to COVID-19, nor do I financially benefit in any way from sharing information about COVID-19.
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A common request I'm asked is who I follow. Here's a public Twitter list of many of the sources I read.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1260956929205112834
This list is biased by design. It is limited to authors who predominantly post in the English language. It is heavily biased towards individual researchers and away from institutions. It is biased towards those who publish or share research, data, papers, etc. I have made an attempt to follow researchers from different countries, and also to make the list reasonably gender-balanced, because multiple, diverse perspectives on research data are essential.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.