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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' hand-picked surgeon general has warned against getting the new COVID-19 booster vaccine that is expected to receive approval in the coming days. The state's Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo made the claims at a press conference on Thursday, saying there was no evidence to support getting the shot and that there are 'red flags' about its safety. The updated shots, which target an Omicron subvariant named XBB.1.5, are awaiting FDA approval on standards for safety, effectiveness and quality, and must then receive CDC sign-off, which could come as early as Tuesday. 'Listen inside to what makes sense,...

Fauci and Muriel Bowser, mayor of D.C., visit the neighborhood of Anacostia and go door-to-door, encouraging residents to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and combating vaccine hesistancy... Fauci reacts to one resident saying no to the vaccine: "It's so crazy. .. they're not doing it because they say they don't want to do it. They're Republicans. They don't like to be told what to do. And we got to break that, unpack that."

China says its official COVID-19 vaccination rate is around 90%, but it's not hard to find people who have been avoiding the jab. Take Faye Fei, for example. She's a 32-year-old lifestyle blogger who lives in the city of Hangzhou, about an hour from Shanghai by high-speed train. "I have an advantage in that I don't go to an office to work. I don't have a job at a company or in a government agency and don't really come into contact with a lot of people," she says. "Also I think I protect myself pretty well." On top of that,...

Vaccine hesitancy remains a public health challenge that cuts across the country as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, but Republican voters and Black people are among the most hesitant to get the shot, according to a new Portland State University study. Arun Pallathadka, a Ph.D. student in PSU's Earth, Environment and Society's program, and Heejun Chang, professor of geography, conducted a spatial analysis of vaccination data at the county level across the U.S. to identify the social, ecological and technological factors impacting vaccine rates. Among the findings: -Vaccine hesitancy is strong in many Republican counties across the U.S., especially in...

The Cleveland Clinic appears prepared to condemn some patients to death with its requirement that transplant donors accept a Covid-19 vaccination.The Cleveland Clinic, a world-renowned surgery center and provider of modern medical miracles, announced Friday that it will require both transplant donors and recipients to have received a Covid-19 vaccination.Michael Ganim is a 52-year-old man from Cleveland dying from kidney failure. He has been a Cleveland Clinic patient for years and on the organ donor transplant list since last October. Ganim’s polycystic kidney disease almost killed him in March 2020, and he and his family have ridden the emotional rollercoaster...

...The pandemic, these professionals say, is entering a dark new phase. Nearly half the nation rejects vaccines, goes maskless and sees virus restrictions as an assault on liberty. As cases rise again, scientists and doctors are grappling with the exasperating realization that the country has the means to tame this virus, but large parts of the population reject them."How much more energy and effort can the nation exert to save even more lives when Americans, given the options and tools to save themselves, aren’t doing it?” said James Hodge, director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at...

The June 2021 Religion and the Vaccine Survey, conducted jointly by PRRI and IFYC, updates and expands on the March 2021 PRRI–IFYC Religion and the Vaccine Survey, documenting how faith-based approaches supporting vaccine uptake can—and did—influence members of key hesitant groups to get vaccinated, as well as which groups pushed the country closer to vaccination goals and which groups still lag behind. The U.S. fell short of the 70% vaccinated goal that the Biden administration set for the July 4th holiday, but it came close. While many states and localities did achieve that goal, the second quarter of 2021 also...

Despite the implications of effectively banning higher percentages of black people from their premises, many major employers, especially universities, have mandated COVID vaccination.While 46 percent of white Americans have received at least one COVID vaccine shot by now, only 33 percent of black Americans have done the same, according to the federal data available as of June 21 and analyzed most recently by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). This means that, under the “disparate impact” standard now used to convict a workplace of racial discrimination under federal regulations and to accuse the United States of “systemic racism,” any use of...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now claims that "healthy young children" can die from COVID-19. Marty Makary wants to see the evidence. "In reviewing the medical literature and news reports, and in talking to pediatricians across the country, I am not aware of a single healthy child in the U.S. who has died of COVID-19 to date," the Johns Hopkins University professor of medicine and public health said Thursday. Archived versions of the CDC's web page comparing COVID-19 and seasonal influenza show that it revised the "differences" in the section "People at High-Risk for Severe Illness" sometime between...

WASHINGTON — Federal health agencies on Tuesday will call for an immediate pause in use of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine after six recipients in the United States developed a rare disorder involving blood clots within about two weeks of vaccination, officials briefed on the decision said.