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Column: Does Ron DeSantis even believe his dangerous B.S. about COVID vaccines?

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Column: Does Ron DeSantis even believe his dangerous B.S. about COVID vaccines?

The latest government advisories on the new monovalent COVID-19 vaccines were not much of a surprise. On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccines as safe and effective, and a day later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the shots for all Americans over the age of six months.

Even less of a surprise was the reaction of the resolutely anti-vax, anti-science Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Republican, who is angling for the GOP nomination for president, staged a roundtable of scientific mountebanks on Wednesday to attack the vaccines.

They included his crackpot state surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, and Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, who is a member of a COVID-19 advisory committee assembled by DeSantis. Bhattacharya is also a purveyor of a fatuous program of usless anti-COVID policies that has been impervious to the raw data that persistently demonstrated that it did not work.

There’s been an enormous experience with this vaccine, with more than 13 billion doses distributed. It is arguably one of the best-studied vaccines in history, with a tremendous safety record.

— Vaccine authority Paul Offit, The Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia

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In the course of the event, Ladapo announced that the state Department of Health would advise against anyone under 65 taking the new vaccine.

DeSantis’ roundtable took place, naturally, on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which is today most notable as the place where truth goes to die.

The roundtable, as one might have predicted, was an agglomeration of misinformation, misunderstanding and misrepresentation that amounted to a public health threat in real time.

It raised the question of how many lives would be saved across the country if DeSantis’ presidential campaign completes its glide path to irrelevancy, sapping his quest for the most politically expedient right-wing policy prescriptions.

The answer, conservatively, is hundreds of thousands. Florida boasts one of the worst COVID death rates in the nation, more than 391 deaths per 100,000 population. If Florida’s rate were applied to the entire U.S. population instead of the national rate of 338.6 deaths per 100,000, then nearly 1.3 million Americans would have perished from the disease, instead of the documented toll of 1.1 million.

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(By the same token, if the entire U.S. had California’s low death rate of 258 per 100,000, the national death toll would have been lower by 267,500.)

In other words, the end to DeSantis’ boorish, charisma-free performance on the campaign trail would be a public health boon. Can there be any greater proof of the adage that “elections have consequences”?

What’s curious is that DeSantis’ attack on the vaccines is a complete about-face from his initial reaction. On Dec. 14, 2020, he stood at a lectern in Tampa and bragged about having been on hand that day for the very first shipments of the vaccine to his state. “I had the privilege to be able to actually sign for the vaccines from FedEx,” he said.

Soon after that, however, he must have concluded that his path to challenging Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination involved kowtowing to the far right wing. That included embracing the anti-vaccination movement in a bear hug.

That said, let’s take a look at the roundtable, which was a one-stop shop for anti-vaccine tropes.

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The event started out as a flat-out attack on the CDC and FDA, aimed at undermining the credibility of the nation’s leading public health agencies.

This has long been a theme of DeSantis’ world. As long ago as 2021 he was fundraising off a personal attack on Anthony Fauci, who was not associated with either agency but was the nation’s most respected authority on epidemics and immunology. His campaign sold T-shirts bearing the slogan “Don’t Fauci my Florida.”

An online fundraising appeal made Fauci the subject of every paragraph. “I refused to blindly follow Dr. Fauci … and allow him to strip Floridians of their God-given freedoms,” DeSantis declared. “I chose to lift Florida up, not follow the lead of Dr. Fauci and lock Florida down.”

Ladapo opened the roundtable by stating, “We continue to live in a world where the CDC and the FDA, when it comes to COVID at least, are just beating their own path in a direction that’s just inexplicable, in terms of thinking about data and thinking about common sense.”

This is a guy who has promoted nostrums that science has shown to be utterly useless against COVID, such as the anti-parasitic ivermectin and the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine.

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Ladapo turned the mike over to Bhattacharya. He aired the familiar anti-vaxxers’ complaint that the new vaccine has not been subjected to a randomized clinical test. This is a claim popularized by anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it’s utterly bogus.

As I reported earlier, randomized testing of every iteration of the current vaccines is unethical, unwise and unnecessary. The truth is that such trials are important when an entirely novel product is developed, as occurred when the mRNA vaccines against COVID most widely used today were originally developed by Moderna and Pfizer.

“There’s been an enormous experience with this vaccine, with more than 13 billion doses distributed,” says Paul Offit, a vaccine authority at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. “It is arguably one of the best-studied vaccines in history, with a tremendous safety record,” Offit told me.

Demanding a randomized prospective trial for every iteration of this vaccine makes no more sense than doing so for the annual updates of the flu vaccine, which doesn’t happen, Offit says.

Bhattacharya also implied that the protection against COVID provided by the previous vaccine versions is modest and “short-lived,” based on the waning of antibody levels over the months after the shot. Of the new shot, he said, “We don’t know that it protects you against being hospitalized, we don’t know that it protects you against dying.”

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Yet it’s well understood that antibodies always fade during the months after a shot.

Is there any dabout that vaccination keeps people healthier against COVID-19? These charts from the CDC show that vaccinated Americans were safer from infection and death than the unvaccinated through the entire pandemic.

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

In the case of COVID, Offit told me, “the critical immunological component responsible for protecting against severe disease is the memory T-cells, which are long-lived and recognize parts of the virus that have been generally conserved, from Wuhan-1 [the original recognized strain] to BA.2.86 [the rapidly spreading strain against which the new vaccines are expected to be effective].”

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As for the suggestion that the vaccinations don’t protect much against COVID, that’s absurd. Data have consistently shown that case and death rates have been higher among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated, sometimes as much as 14 times higher.

That brings us to what may be the most preposterous and irresponsible claim aired by Ladapo during the roundtable.

“Multiple studies” in the U.S., the Middle East, Iceland and other places, he said, “are now finding that after four to six months, what was just waning effectiveness … is entering a negative area,” which means that after a period there is “risk of increased infection. This is obviously an enormous finding.”

It also appears to be wholly mythical. Ladapo wasn’t very precise about where he got the idea that vaccination can increase susceptibility to COVID, a phenonomenon known as “negative immunity” or “negative efficacy.” But it needs to be stifled at birth.

I asked Ladapo’s health department to identify the studies he referred to. The agency didn’t respond, but the vaccine advisory it issued later Thursday listed 14 studies backing up Ladapo’s claims supporting his caution about the vaccines.

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Not a single one supported his claims about negative immunity. One, of vaccination outcomes in Qatar, mentioned such a finding, but cautioned that it was almost certainly due to bias in the study design and “not true negative biological effectiveness.” On the whole, the study certified that the mRNA vaccines provide “strong and durable protection against COVID-19 hospitalization and death.”

As for Iceland, the health department advisory listed a study from that country that found that the rate of reinfection from the Omicron variant of COVID increased with the time since vaccination, and that the rate of reinfection was slightly higher among Icelanders who had two shots than one. But it advised that the finding should be “interpreted with caution” because of the complexities of assessing the conditions under which the shots were administered and the Icelandic lifestyle.

The notion of “negative immunity” appears mostly to derive from a 2022 article on a right-wing website that stupidly misconstrued graphs in a scientific paper.

That paper’s author, Danyu Lin of the University of North Carolina, conclusively refuted the interpretation in interviews with Reuters and the Associated Press. “The statement that ‘the vaccine destroys any protection a person has from natural immunity’ is unfounded,” he told Reuters. He told the AP, “The evidence we have supports the finding that natural immunity is boosted by vaccination rather than being destroyed by vaccination as claimed.”

Yet the claim was swiftly taken up by the far right and anti-vax communities because it fed their conspiracy theories so well.

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Ladapo and DeSantis, despite their claim to adhere to science and data, are all too happy to retail this claptrap. Have they come to believe their claims? Or are they just trying to slip lies past a credulous public for their own malignant purposes?

We have one clue from Ladapo’s history of flagrant falsehoods. We know from reporting last April in Politico that he personally altered a state-sponsored study of the COVID vaccines to inflate their risk to young men, which fed his anti-vaccination mindset.

In March, the FDA and CDC warned Ladapo in an unusual, if not unique, joint letter that his claims about the purported dangers of the COVID vaccines were “incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public.” Misinformation like his denigrating vaccine safety “has led to unnecessary death, severe illness and hospitalization.”

In short, he and his mentor in the Florida statehouse are menaces to the public health. Perhaps if DeSantis’ presidential campaign finally crashes and burns, he’ll give up on the attacks on COVID vaccination and return to his original stance, when the vaccines were first introduced in early 2020 and he gloated about obtaining an early shipment for his state.

Until then, unfortunately, public health sits on a knife‘s edge. DeSantis and Ladapo are the most prominent public officials undermining the crucial effort to get more Americans vaccinated. As the toll continues to mount, the blood is on their hands.

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Cluster of farmworkers diagnosed with rare animal-borne disease in Ventura County

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Cluster of farmworkers diagnosed with rare animal-borne disease in Ventura County

A cluster of workers at Ventura County berry farms have been diagnosed with a rare disease often transmitted through sick animals’ urine, according to a public health advisory distributed to local doctors by county health officials Tuesday.

The bacterial infection, leptospirosis, has resulted in severe symptoms for some workers, including meningitis, an inflammation of the brain lining and spinal cord. Symptoms for mild cases included headaches and fevers.

The disease, which can be fatal, rarely spreads from human to human, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ventura County Public Health has not given an official case count but said it had not identified any cases outside of the agriculture sector. The county’s agriculture commissioner was aware of 18 cases, the Ventura County Star reported.

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The health department said it was first contacted by a local physician in October, who reported an unusual trend in symptoms among hospital patients.

After launching an investigation, the department identified leptospirosis as a probable cause of the illness and found most patients worked on caneberry farms that utilize hoop houses — greenhouse structures to shelter the crops.

As the investigation to identify any additional cases and the exact sources of exposure continues, Ventura County Public Health has asked healthcare providers to consider a leptospirosis diagnosis for sick agricultural workers, particularly berry harvesters.

Rodents are a common source and transmitter of disease, though other mammals — including livestock, cats and dogs — can transmit it as well.

The disease is spread through bodily fluids, such as urine, and is often contracted through cuts and abrasions that contact contaminated water and soil, where the bacteria can survive for months.

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Humans can also contract the illness through contaminated food; however, the county health agency has found no known health risks to the general public, including through the contact or consumption of caneberries such as raspberries and blackberries.

Symptom onset typically occurs between two and 30 days after exposure, and symptoms can last for months if untreated, according to the CDC.

The illness often begins with mild symptoms, with fevers, chills, vomiting and headaches. Some cases can then enter a second, more severe phase that can result in kidney or liver failure.

Ventura County Public Health recommends agriculture and berry harvesters regularly rinse any cuts with soap and water and cover them with bandages. They also recommend wearing waterproof clothing and protection while working outdoors, including gloves and long-sleeve shirts and pants.

While there is no evidence of spread to the larger community, according to the department, residents should wash hands frequently and work to control rodents around their property if possible.

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Pet owners can consult a veterinarian about leptospirosis vaccinations and should keep pets away from ponds, lakes and other natural bodies of water.

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Political stress: Can you stay engaged without sacrificing your mental health?

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Political stress: Can you stay engaged without sacrificing your mental health?

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump won the presidential election, but Stacey Lamirand’s brain hasn’t stopped churning.

“I still think about the election all the time,” said the 60-year-old Bay Area resident, who wanted a Kamala Harris victory so badly that she flew to Pennsylvania and knocked on voters’ doors in the final days of the campaign. “I honestly don’t know what to do about that.”

Neither do the psychologists and political scientists who have been tracking the country’s slide toward toxic levels of partisanship.

Fully 69% of U.S. adults found the presidential election a significant source of stress in their lives, the American Psychological Assn. said in its latest Stress in America report.

The distress was present across the political spectrum, with 80% of Republicans, 79% of Democrats and 73% of independents surveyed saying they were stressed about the country’s future.

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That’s unhealthy for the body politic — and for voters themselves. Stress can cause muscle tension, headaches, sleep problems and loss of appetite. Chronic stress can inflict more serious damage to the immune system and make people more vulnerable to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, infertility, clinical anxiety, depression and other ailments.

In most circumstances, the sound medical advice is to disengage from the source of stress, therapists said. But when stress is coming from politics, that prescription pits the health of the individual against the health of the nation.

“I’m worried about people totally withdrawing from politics because it’s unpleasant,” said Aaron Weinschenk, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay who studies political behavior and elections. “We don’t want them to do that. But we also don’t want them to feel sick.”

Modern life is full of stressors of all kinds: paying bills, pleasing difficult bosses, getting along with frenemies, caring for children or aging parents (or both).

The stress that stems from politics isn’t fundamentally different from other kinds of stress. What’s unique about it is the way it encompasses and enhances other sources of stress, said Brett Ford, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto who studies the link between emotions and political engagement.

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For instance, she said, elections have the potential to make everyday stressors like money and health concerns more difficult to manage as candidates debate policies that could raise the price of gas or cut off access to certain kinds of medical care.

Layered on top of that is the fact that political disagreements have morphed into moral conflicts that are perceived as pitting good against evil.

“When someone comes into power who is not on the same page as you morally, that can hit very deeply,” Ford said.

Partisanship and polarization have raised the stakes as well. Voters who feel a strong connection to a political party become more invested in its success. That can make a loss at the ballot box feel like a personal defeat, she said.

There’s also the fact that we have limited control over the outcome of an election. A patient with heart disease can improve their prognosis by taking medicine, changing their diet, getting more exercise or quitting smoking. But a person with political stress is largely at the mercy of others.

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“Politics is many forms of stress all rolled into one,” Ford said.

Weinschenk observed this firsthand the day after the election.

“I could feel it when I went into my classroom,” said the professor, whose research has found that people with political anxiety aren’t necessarily anxious in general. “I have a student who’s transgender and a couple of students who are gay. Their emotional state was so closed down.”

That’s almost to be expected in a place like Wisconsin, whose swing-state status caused residents to be bombarded with political messages. The more campaign ads a person is exposed to, the greater the risk of being diagnosed with anxiety, depression or another psychological ailment, according to a 2022 study in the journal PLOS One.

Political messages seem designed to keep voters “emotionally on edge,” said Vaile Wright, a licensed psychologist in Villa Park, Ill., and a member of the APA’s Stress in America team.

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“It encourages emotion to drive our decision-making behavior, as opposed to logic,” Wright said. “When we’re really emotionally stimulated, it makes it so much more challenging to have civil conversation. For politicians, I think that’s powerful, because emotions can be very easily manipulated.”

Making voters feel anxious is a tried-and-true way to grab their attention, said Christopher Ojeda, a political scientist at UC Merced who studies mental health and politics.

“Feelings of anxiety can be mobilizing, definitely,” he said. “That’s why politicians make fear appeals — they want people to get engaged.”

On the other hand, “feelings of depression are demobilizing and take you out of the political system,” said Ojeda, author of “The Sad Citizen: How Politics is Depressing and Why it Matters.”

“What [these feelings] can tell you is, ‘Things aren’t going the way I want them to. Maybe I need to step back,’” he said.

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Genessa Krasnow has been seeing a lot of that since the election.

The Seattle entrepreneur, who also campaigned for Harris, said it grates on her to see people laughing in restaurants “as if nothing had happened.” At a recent book club meeting, her fellow group members were willing to let her vent about politics for five minutes, but they weren’t interested in discussing ways they could counteract the incoming president.

“They’re in a state of disengagement,” said Krasnow, who is 56. She, meanwhile, is looking for new ways to reach young voters.

“I am exhausted. I am so sad,” she said. “But I don’t believe that disengaging is the answer.”

That’s the fundamental trade-off, Ojeda said, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

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“Everyone has to make a decision about how much engagement they can tolerate without undermining their psychological well-being,” he said.

Lamirand took steps to protect her mental health by cutting social media ties with people whose values aren’t aligned with hers. But she will remain politically active and expects to volunteer for phone-banking duty soon.

“Doing something is the only thing that allows me to feel better,” Lamirand said. “It allows me to feel some level of control.”

Ideally, Ford said, people would not have to choose between being politically active and preserving their mental health. She is investigating ways to help people feel hopeful, inspired and compassionate about political challenges, since these emotions can motivate action without triggering stress and anxiety.

“We want to counteract this pattern where the more involved you are, the worse you are,” Ford said.

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The benefits would be felt across the political spectrum. In the APA survey, similar shares of Democrats, Republicans and independents agreed with statements like, “It causes me stress that politicians aren’t talking about the things that are most important to me,” and, “The political climate has caused strain between my family members and me.”

“Both sides are very invested in this country, and that is a good thing,” Wright said. “Antipathy and hopelessness really doesn’t serve us in the long run.”

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Video: SpaceX Unable to Recover Booster Stage During Sixth Test Flight

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Video: SpaceX Unable to Recover Booster Stage During Sixth Test Flight

President-elect Donald Trump joined Elon Musk in Texas and watched the launch from a nearby location on Tuesday. While the Starship’s giant booster stage was unable to repeat a “chopsticks” landing, the vehicle’s upper stage successfully splashed down in the Indian Ocean.

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