The Washington Post‘s headline (4/29/22) seems to play down the importance of vaccination—relegating the crucial message that people are dying for lack of boosters to the subhead.
On April 29, the Washington Post (4/29/22) reported that Covid deaths among the vaccinated have been up sharply in 2022—42% of deaths in January and February were among vaccinated people according to the Post’s analysis of state and federal data—and that “a key explanation for the rise in deaths among the vaccinated is that Covid-19 fatalities are again concentrated among the elderly.” The paper went on to report that “the bulk of vaccinated deaths are among people who did not get a booster shot,” noting that data showed that in California and Mississippi 75% of the vaccinated seniors who died of Covid in the first two months of 2022 were not boosted.
The New York Times ran a story on May 31 with similar content. The Post’s piece was framed around deaths among the vaccinated, while the Times’s focus was deaths during the winter omicron surge, but the narrative pointed to the same data: that in 2022 the vast bulk of deaths were once again among the elderly, as they had been in 2020 before the availability of vaccines. Covid is “preying on long delays since their last shots,” the Times piece said, and accompanying graphs and charts show that vaccines without boosters have left many vulnerable to serious illness and death.
Both pieces demonstrate that for the elderly, getting booster shots is literally a matter of life and death. Multiple studies in both Israel and the US point to the same conclusion (here and here, for instance).
Yet neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times directly address the lagging booster rate among older USians. Fewer than half of all those eligible have received a first booster shot; among those over 65, only 69% have gotten at least one booster shot—a significant difference from the 90%+ who have received the initial one- or two-shot vaccination series (KHN, 5/12/22).
Given that seniors are clearly not vaccine-averse, and that without boosters they are at significant risk of death, the question of why more people 65 and older are not getting boosted is a pressing public health problem, one that ought to be getting significant media attention, given how many lives are at stake.
Covid cases in the US have risen sharply over the last two months, but in that time there’s been hardly any mention in corporate media of the lagging booster rate among older USians, and even less analysis.
‘Faulty messaging’
“The booster program has been botched from day one,” Kaiser Health News (5/12/22) reports—citing as an example the fact that the CDC uses the phrase “fully vaccinated” to refer to people it maintains are insufficiently vaccinated.
As far as I can tell, there has been exactly one article whose subject is the low booster rate among US seniors: “Why Won’t More Older Americans Get Their Covid Boosters?” by Liz Szabo from Kaiser Health News (5/12/22). That piece was reposted by NBC (5/11/22) and CNN (5/13/22). It cited “a chorus of leading researchers” blaming “faulty messaging on booster shots”; quoted one institute director saying, “the booster program has been botched from day one”; and explained changes in the federal government’s distribution of vaccines that contribute to the lower booster rate:
Although the Biden administration coordinated vaccine delivery to nursing homes, football stadiums, and other targeted venues early last year, the federal government has played a far less central role in delivering boosters…. Today, nursing homes are largely responsible for boosting their residents…. And outside of nursing homes, people generally must find their own boosters, either through clinics, local pharmacies, or primary care providers.
Evidence suggests that this lack of support from the federal government is responsible for the lagging senior booster rate. In Minnesota, which at 83% has the highest senior booster rate of any state, officials used federal CARES money to bring mobile vaccine clinics to neighborhoods and mobile home parks and to provide booster shots to residents and staffers in long-term care facilities (KHN, 5/12/22).
The May 31 New York Times piece, without mentioning the lagging booster rate per se, did make several mentions of the obstacles older people face in getting boosted. It also said, “Scientists said that the wintertime spike in Covid death rates among older Americans demanded a more urgent policy response.” The need for a better government response, though, is ongoing.
Most reporting on the overall low booster rate tends toward blaming individuals for their failure to get boosted. Structural causes are nowhere in sight. There’s a fair amount of talk about the “confusion” and “debate” about the second booster recommendation, but explanations for the low rate amount to comments like “a majority of the vaccinated public has not been convinced” (Washington Post, 3/25/22) and “risk analysis is not the strong suit of most people” (Washington Post, 4/20/22).
‘For whatever reason’
The Washington Post (4/18/22) waits until the next-to-last paragraph to convey the key facts: “The weekly death rate over the final three months of 2021 was a little more than 1 per million for boosted people, and about 6 per million for vaccinated-but-unboosted people. Those compare to the 78 per million weekly rate we see from unvaccinated people.”
Besides the Kaiser Health News story, I could find only one other article specifically on the low booster rate in the US, the Washington Post‘s “The Troublesome US Booster Gap” (4/18/22), though it made no mention of the special vulnerability of older USians or their part in this trend. The piece, labeled an “analysis,” began by noting:
Booster shots are a significant shortcoming in the federal government’s coronavirus response—with no easy answers for why it has happened or what to do about it.
Reporter Aaron Blake then went on to list various factors contributing to the booster gap. The first was “how partisan vaccines have become in the United States.” Acknowledging that this doesn’t explain everything, he mentioned “people who were willing to get two shots and, for whatever reason, haven’t been persuaded to get a third.” The article continued, “Another potential reason is the confusing rollout,” and added “there are signs that opposition to boosters is increasing and hardening among the vaccinated.” It then cited a bunch of opinion polls. That’s the “analysis,” and it never really went any deeper than the observation that “for whatever reason” some people don’t want to get a third shot.
All of this boils down once again to blaming individuals for not getting boosted. This is bad journalism in general, and does nothing to explain why people in institutional settings like nursing homes—those most at risk—aren’t getting boosted. At the end, the Post tosses off the observation that “our lagging booster rate creates all kinds of potential consequences down the road.” Those unnamed consequences, of course, include the unnecessary deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of older people—people whose low booster rate didn’t rate a mention in the article.
Capitol Hill ‘gambit’
The New York Times (5/11/22) presents the failure to pass life-saving Covid aid as a bipartisan puzzle rather than as a Republican refusal.
A May 20 New York Times piece about the CDC recommendation that everyone over 50 get a second booster quoted the agency’s concern about “a steep and substantial increase in hospitalizations for older Americans” as a part of the reason for the recommendation. The article notes that “only one-fourth of those 65 and older who have gotten one booster dose…have gotten a second,” but doesn’t say anything at all about the low first booster rate, though clearly it is responsible for the alarming rise in hospitalizations as well as deaths.
Meanwhile, corporate coverage of the fight over additional Covid funding has largely followed predictable patterns. In an April 28 piece, the Washington Post mixed metaphors of various “games” the Democrats and Republicans are playing: “Covid Funding Has Become a Gambit on Capitol Hill,” the headline reported, while the article said “Democratic leaders haven’t yet shown their cards.”
The New York Times (5/11/22) described the funding as stuck in “an election-year dispute over immigration.” (There’s a whole world of problems with that last phrase in terms of corporate coverage of immigration, which is even worse than when I wrote about it recently—FAIR.org, 4/22/22.)
Left unsaid in these pieces is that if Republicans continue to succeed in blocking additional Covid funding, many more people will die. Most of them will be over 65.
There was one article that acknowledged the direct link between funding and deaths. On May 6, in “The White House, Warning of a Fall Surge, Plans for How to Provide Vaccines if There’s No More Covid Aid,” the New York Times reported that the Biden administration is planning to divert funds for therapeutics and testing for a “bare bones” vaccination effort if additional funding is not approved. That effort would be aimed at older and immune-compromised people. It adds, “But if access to vaccines is limited, the United States could see hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
Human rights atrocity
In mustering evidence for what the Biden administration sees as “the country’s success” in dealing with the coronavirus, the New York Times (5/18/22) notes that “Many people are vaccinated, [and] a fair number are boosted.” By “a fair number,” the Times means 32% of the total population.
The article does not say what a “bare bones” vaccination program would look like, but it is hard to imagine it would include the kinds of efforts the Kaiser Health News analysis identified as necessary to increase the booster rate among seniors. It’s outrageous that GOP obstruction could result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and equally outrageous that this reality is not being plainly reported on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.
It’s also outrageous that Democrats are unwilling to either go to the mat for Covid funding or to call out Republicans for their callous disregard for human life, the party’s “pro-life” platform notwithstanding. But as the Times noted in an article (5/18/22) on the CDC’s alarm about rising cases:
The warnings from…federal health officials seemed somewhat at odds with President Biden’s own stance…. He no longer treats the pandemic as his chief concern among many…. The new approach is… a recognition of the political reality. Many Americans have decided to accept the risk of infection to resume their normal routines.
There’s a lot that could be said about the public health failures that have led “many” USians to return to “normal,” but for older people, “normal” means no additional government efforts to make boosters available, increasing risk of infection as restrictions continue to be lifted, and additional unnecessary deaths.
The utter failure to protect older people from death has been a singular catastrophe within the overall disaster that is the United States’ response to the Covid pandemic. Those 65 and older account for 75% of all covid deaths, and the elderly living in long-term care facilities have suffered even greater death rates. A staggering 8% of all such people have died of Covid; for nursing home residents, that figure is 10%. Scholar and blogger Dave Kingsley reported that it is “the largest mass fatality of an institutionalized population in the history of the United States.”
The willingness of corporate media to normalize so much preventable death makes them complicit in what Kingsley rightly called a “human rights atrocity.”
There is a reason that 1 in 100 Americans over the age of 65 have died of COVID.
Click on my name for more.
Ignore the click bait offer regarding this prostitute or hoe looking for $$’s from plp on this site. Some plp have no shame.
Thanks for proving that ignorance has no shame, Riley. No profits here!
Maybe you could do a little research, before proving what a douche you are.
The only old folks the corpress care about are those with “old money”
A little immunology might help: the original formulations of the shot no longer work. It makes no difference to induce antibodies to the extinct wuhan strain. That’s what the boosters do. The virus has mutated well beyond the spike protein antibodies induced by the shots.
Some people understand this, but apparently, FAIR doesn’t.
I don’t understand it either. Especially, since I have not gotten sick yet.
Agreed and so ends another episode of… Things get nutty at Fair.org
Lololol, I’m 100% certain you’re and immunologist.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/booster-shots-roll-nationwide-scientists-stress-original-vaccines/story?id=80778086
It is not the media’s job to push shots unless it’s on the opinion. The media’s job is to publish balanced news articles based on facts. My question is why didn’t the media seek out the seniors who aren’t getting the shots? As a senior myself—I’ll soon be 72—I can tell you why some of us aren’t getting the boosters. I had Covid myself, in November 2020. I chose to treat myself at home with quercetin, vitamins D and C, and zinc, and nebulizer treatments when my O2 went below 90. I never left the house for 28 days and there were some days I didn’t think I would ever feel like going anywhere again. I did get well, though, and I get antibody tests every 6 months. My last one was last week and my antibodies are still quite high a year and a half out. Aside from the fact that my doctors told me never to take a vaccine of any kind, I don’t think I need a shot. The people who had Covid the same time I did (we all were exposed at the same place) who got shots after they got well were so sick they said it was far worse than Covid itself. We’ve watched our friends keel over with strokes after the boosters, and my husband’s best friend’s wife died 2 days after her booster. When you see enough of that going on, or when your last shot made you so sick you thought you’d rather be dead, then YOU DON’T GO GET A BOOSTER. For the record, my own personal physician got both of the first two shots and she said the second one made her so sick she would NEVER get another. How many newspapers and magazines have bothered to do that part of the story? Quit whining that the NYT didn’t push the shots more; they’ve certainly been pushing them enough already, from the start. They can quit anytime.
Thanks for the fan-fiction, CO.
This article is so far off the mark and behind the most recent data, it’s embarrassing. It doesn’t matter which age group you’re looking at, in my home state, these are the numbers. Comparng unvaxxed, vaxed and vaxxed + boosted, the absolute worst outcomes are among the boosted. Stop falling for Big Pharma + Surveillance State propaganda and start doing some real research. In the last few months, some of the worst outbreaks of Covid virus have occurred in countries with the highest vaccination rates; Portugal, Australia and New Zealand, among others. The mRNA experimental therapeutic products given fast track emergency authorization and too hasty FDA approval thanks to rigged trials and lavish, unlimited spending on public relations and lobbying are a greater risk to public health than they are a benefit. Immunity provided wanes much too quickly and adverse reactions and “breakthrough” infections and re-infections occur and reoccur because of compromised natural immunity. Adverse vaccine reactions have also been horrific and horrifically under-reported. Uncensored reports from military health insurance providers show inexplicable spikes in rates of heart issues, neurological conditions and cancers.
This is an otherwise crappy right wing news site but this time they’re more on top of the real situation and circumstances than you are. Real numbers from Wisconsin Public Health agency:
https://www.maciverinstitute.com/category/covid-19/
This is the link to the article I referred to. The one I mistakenly put in first reply is a topic link on that website:
https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2022/05/highest-infection-rates-are-among-the-boosted-according-to-dhs/
Do you always reply to your own posts… or just when nobody responds?
Are you the official FAIR troll? Asking for a friend.
Yes, he is a troll and the primary site minder. But careful now – he could be CIA, FBI, NSA or DI too and probably gets a decent vig from the site web master at a minimum.
To Mike Kostich,
You can get off line and spend some actual time talking to people in real life in your neighborhood, town, city or wherever, who’ve been vaccinated and boosted. These silly “Wisconsin Department of Health Services” polls are bull. Clearly someone dressed that nonsense up to appear to be scientifically credible and did so for the purposes of clickbait ad revenue and nothing more – leave that bull crap alone.
Either way, such online garbage (regardless of the credibility of its alleged source) is not going to get you any closer to truth in terms of what the virus actually is, what the vaccines actually are and how people are doing after having been vaccinated and boosted. To understand how people are doing after being vaccinated and boosted you have to talk to them in person. In person data is empirical while online virtual information is technically not.
In person evidence will give you the real picture of reality about people who’ve received both the vaccine and the booster. Virtual information online is intrinsically limited (all of it) it will never be equal to empirical evidence. Empiricism comes by way of impacting all of your perceptual faculties, nothing online can be touched, tasted, heard in person as is, smelled, and experienced from a first person perspective because it will always remain a pixelated re-represented image that is only analogous to the superficial appearance of the reality it mimics. In this way virtual reality will always be inferior to empirical reality, because the virtual images will never be identical in scope to the real world out here.
It is amazing that so many people have forgotten this, and how so many have gotten lured down one rabbit hole after another with all of this online nonsense. It appears that some have even taken the extraordinary step of replacing empirical reality with the abstract virtual claims of the online world….it’s pathetic.
People who think what they’re seeing online is somehow more truthful than the real world they actually live in suffer from a pathological conditioning (none of us are immune to this either.)
Stop believing everything you read online, go out into the actual world wherever you live to get to the real truth…and by the way do yourself a favor and leave that damn phone of yours at home too…this way when you go out to interview people in your community who’ve been vaccinated you can’t be tracked by the algorithm and other lousy no good spying services plugged into your phone’s apps.
Take it easy and don’t be too hard on yourself…we all deserve a break from this noise every now and then.
Since the CDC has been caught lying, I’ve stopped listening.
I got my 1st covid shot March 19, 2021. It hurt—no other problems. The 2nd shot…OMG, it felt like my arm had turned into a leg and that leg weighed a ton!
Pfizer was the shot for both. That feeling of a heavy leg lasted for several weeks, and did it go away? NO! I had a feeling in my waist that that leg weight hung in as a separate appendage for a few months..
The 1st booster was Moderna—-This time the right side of my body ached in the waist area on the right side. It took months for me to be able to do sit ups as I used to do.
So—will I get a 2nd booster—NO. The muscles in my back are still not up to snuff—-and for whatever reason—Pfizer began it all.
I received my 2 Pfizer shots at a college in an outdoor area, and I received the Moderna in a pharmacy. I decided that feeling awful after all those shots was enough.
But of course, Big Pharama—weren’t they the same people who killed patients for 7 years with Vioxx? Where did all the honest people like Dr. Salk go? Or, is money now more important than humanity?
The ignorance of most of these comments is appalling. Vitamins do not fight off viruses; the CDC has some serious problems, but that does not undermine the importance of receiving a booster shot; and claiming countries with high vaccination rates have higher infections, that people die of booster shots, that the awful gubmint is trying to poison us, is a pack of conspiracy-mongering lies. It’s a scientific fact that the mRNA vaccine has saved a vast number of lives.
Using false info to mislead people who have avoided indoor crowds, worn masks, and gotten their vaccinations is vile, stupid, and downright malignant.
Obviously Biden and Congress would rather subsidize Lockheed as opposed to Moderna. Perhaps Lockheed writes bigger checks for campaign donations, Mike Liston
It is useful to compare excess death rates and those directly attributed to Covid-19 between China and pretty much the rest of the world. China’s well-managed public health policies, which include maximum vaccination with boosters, and lockdowns when necessary with locally-organised delivery of essential goods and services, have been highly successful in saving a huge number of lives, according to WHO and Chinese data.
“China’s largest city, Shanghai, largely reopened Wednesday morning after a two-month lockdown that successfully beat back an outbreak of the virulent Omicron BA.2 subvariant of COVID-19. The event was a triumph of public health mobilization, as the outbreak, which reached a peak of almost 30,000 infections per day in mid-April, took the lives of fewer than 600 people, mostly elderly and unvaccinated. For the most part, residents remained in their homes, with the internet their principal connection to the outside world. Food deliveries and supplies of other necessities were organized through the country’s extensive networks of housing blocks and neighborhood committees, later supplanted by the government.
…according to the WHO excess death report recently released, China saw negative 52,000 deaths. In other words, the efforts to address the pandemic also led to lives saved that would have otherwise been lost to other, non-COVID causes.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/02/udbd-j02.html
Wow, the ignorance of many of these comments is striking and this one in particular. To begin, does anyone actually believe ANY information that’s reported from China’s government ?? And the WHO btw is bought and paid for by China. I would believe the BS from our government and the MSM before drinking the Kool Aid and consuming Chinese propaganda. It’s no wonder FOX is the highest rated cbl news show (and I do mean show).
To Barry Cohen,
Where do you get your news from? This is not a rhetorical question, but only seems fair if you are going to mock others and pretend to have more truthful sources for geopolitical information.
If your news resources are better than Rebecca’s then you should not be afraid to post them right? Let’s see for ourselves which of the two of you Rebecca or Barry peruses the more credible news sources for their information shall we?
If you don’t say where you get your news then you have no right to mock others about where they get theirs.
Just saying.
Oh it’s a rhetorical question (no-name) dude and hands down certainly zero sources from China’s XI. Further – as its not China – I have every right to go on record with my thoughts as other minions here have too. Further questions, oh great content and self elected site censor ??
Right Barry ?? So funny as I have never have seen anyone on Fair.com cite totally credible, squeaky clean sources. “Let’s go President Xi” and his little brother (Supreme Leader Lol) Kim Jong-un !!
To Barry,
What do you think of the World Socialist Website? Have you ever heard of Counterpunch, Black Agenda Report, The Intercept, Jacobin, Current Affairs Magazine, The Chauncey Devega Show?
Some are the sources I peruse for “news” (of sorts)…whether about politics or geopolitics, investigative pieces, etc…(some of the above I listen to as a podcast, or weekly show for example.)
You too G. Carlin, and to anyone else where do you get your news these days?
IDK. Maybe asking this kind of question is like asking someone about their religious beliefs, or their political affiliation? Or…is it that people have become so hyper insecure and cynical that they now self censor? Again…IDK.
The advertising for Pfizer has mutated into a religion, as some of the comments in this thread demonstrate. This probably is due to the censorship of heresy by the corporate media including the “social media.” The censors have almost totally eliminated any awareness of the side effects of the vaccine. The faithful shout down the heretics, with snide insults, as illustrated, again, by several of the comments in this thread. Instead of providing empirical data to permit the public to decide for themselves the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, what is misinformation and what is useful information, the corporate media echo the government: Just trust us.