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4 Out of 10 Parents Have No Plans to Get Child Vaccinated for School: Poll
Almost 90% of U.S. parents plan to send their kids back to the classroom this fall, but fewer than 60% plan to get a COVID-19 vaccine for those who are old enough, a new poll reveals.
Anxiety is also high among many parents, who wonder just how safe in-person learning will be as the highly contagious Delta variant spreads nationwide and the pandemic grinds on.
“To feel safe sending their children to school in-person, most parents — especially those still unsure about in-person schooling — want classroom ventilation, teachers to be vaccinated, and social distancing in schools, in that order,” said Heather Schwartz, director of Pre-K to 12 educational systems at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.
UW Medicine Pulls Heart Transplant Patient From List After Refusing COVID Vaccine
The University of Washington Medical Center denied organ transplants to patients who refuse a COVID vaccine as early as June 2021. And hospital officials refuse to answer basic questions about their policy.
In fact, they won’t even directly acknowledge they have a policy.
The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH has learned that UW Medicine removed a 64-year-old patient from the transplant waitlist. He says he was on the list for two and a half years. The hospital made the decision after they learned the patient refused to be vaccinated against COVID. They said they would consider adding him back to the waitlist should he satisfy their “compliance concerns.”
Fully Vaccinated People With ‘Breakthrough’ COVID Delta Infections Carry as Much Virus as the Unvaccinated
A study by University of Oxford scientists has found that people who contract the Delta variant of COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated carry a similar amount of the coronavirus as those who catch the disease and have not been inoculated. The researchers stressed that vaccination still offers good protection against catching the disease in the first place, and protects against getting seriously ill with it.
The survey of real-world U.K. data indicates, however, that vaccinated people with “breakthrough” infections could still pose a significant infection risk to those who have not been vaccinated.
“With Delta, infections occurring following two vaccinations had similar peak viral burden to those in unvaccinated individuals,” the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, concludes. Viral “burden” or viral load refers to how much coronavirus-infected people carry and thus “shed,” or release into the environment around them, where it can potentially infect others.
Where’s the Data on Delta? Lack of Testing, Info Makes It Hard to See Virus’s Full Scope
In the earliest and darkest days of the pandemic last year, health experts were plagued by a lack of coronavirus testing, long wait times for results and an incomplete picture of what was driving outbreaks.
Now, more than a year and a half later, many public health professionals are confronting the same issues.
The delta variant is fueling a devastating new surge of infections, but experts say declines in testing and a lack of granular data about hospitalizations make it difficult to know just how much the virus is circulating in communities — and who remains most vulnerable.
Why Push for Boosters Could Make Pandemic Even Worse
Officials at the World Health Organization said Wednesday that it strongly opposes booster shots for all adults in rich countries because the boosters will not help slow down the pandemic. By diverting doses away from unvaccinated people, booster shots will help drive the emergence of more dangerous mutants, the WHO doctors said.
“I’m afraid that this [booster recommendation] will only lead to more variants … And perhaps we’re heading into an even more dire situation,” WHO chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said.
Will Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccine Recipients Need Booster, Too?
The plan for booster shots laid out by health officials on Wednesday applies to Americans who received both doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, but for the nearly 14 million who received Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose jab, the details are not yet clear.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the data behind the booster plan includes studies that demonstrated waning vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 infection in people who received either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna two-dose shots. The rollout for those shots began months before the Johnson & Johnson vaccine received FDA authorization, however, so the data on long-term effectiveness is forthcoming.
