Elite Discussion Of Vaccine Passport Challlenges By Those Who Would Mandate Them

Harvard |  As COVID-19 vaccines become more widespread, passports that certify immunization status may facilitate a return to normalcy, write Lawrence O. Gostin, I. Glenn Cohen, and Jana Shaw in a viewpoint published today in JAMA.

But these vaccine passports, or digital health passes, are not without scientific, legal, and ethical challenges.

I asked Gostin, Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, Cohen, Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and Shaw, a professor of pediatrics at Upstate Medical University, about the key areas of concern and promise for vaccine passports. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, follows.

Chloe Reichel: What is a digital health pass?

I. Glenn Cohen: A digital health pass, sometimes referred to as a vaccine passport, is essentially a way of digitally recording that someone has had a vaccination, and then details about the date of vaccination, and potentially the kind of vaccine they were given, to the extent relevant. It might be something created by a governmental authority, or might be something created in the private sector.

CR: How can these digital health passes help us get to a new normal?

Jana Shaw: Vaccine passports, or digital health passes, let others know that you are safe and that you are keeping others safe by getting vaccinated. Places that require digital health passes are making sure everyone there is safe.

Lawrence O. Gostin: Essentially, the goal is to try to return to as normal as possible, as safely as we can, and as soon as we can.

And so the idea of a digital health pass is to make sure that everyone in a given space is protected, and also has a diminished potential for spreading the infection to others.

CR: Can you describe some of the scientific challenges associated with implementing digital health passes?

JS: There are numerous challenges to creating digital health passes.

Length of protection is one of them. However, that can be easily addressed by including the date of vaccination. As we get more information on length of protection from vaccination, vaccine passports can be then used accordingly.

Another limitation is that the efficacy of various COVID-19 vaccines differs. However, we recognize that the efficacy differs against developing symptomatic disease, and all authorized vaccines are very effective against serious illness.

In addition, as we monitor the emergence of variants of concern, there have been reports of decreased vaccine efficacy among certain vaccines. However, that currently is being addressed by vaccine manufacturers. They are developing vaccines that target the emergent variants to ensure that their vaccines will continue to be effective as variants evade vaccine-induced immunity.

We could not really talk about challenges and not talk about access to vaccination. Universal access to vaccines has to be ensured before digital health passes are rolled out, to mitigate the risk of transmission and the risk of creating an equity divide for those who are not vaccinated.

The Biosecurity Karenwaffen Will Not Be Satisfied With Merely Shaming Or Punishing You...,

slate |   The second reason shame has been criticized is that many have conflated shame’s worth as a tool with the norms some use shame to try to uphold. The shame that accompanies sexually transmitted infections, for example, has more to do with the problematic norms around sex that remain in our society then shame itself. The shame that accompanies illness more broadly has to do with the problematic norm that assumes, falsely, that we will all remain able-bodied and healthy and that if we do not, it is linked to some form of moral or behavioral failing. In both cases, the shame isn’t the  problem—the norms are. Instead of throwing out shame, we should be more conscious of how we use it.

In spite of the current uproar against it, Americans do routinely use shame as a tool, quietly and comfortably. “We shame poor people all of the time,” said Phuong Luong, a certified financial planner and educator at Just Wealth (and also a friend). In her role as a financial planner, Luong, has helped low-income people access public services. “If you’ve ever gone into an office to apply for public benefits like welfare or food stamps, it can be a really demeaning and stressful experience,” she said. “The quality, tone, and respect in customer service between a private service and a public service is so different. And I think we make poor people jump through so many hoops to show effort and to show motivation, to get what they need.” It’s as if the process was designed to evoke shame.

But shame can work positively as a tool with people or institutions when the thing happening is in fact worth punishing, and other forms of punishment are out of reach. “In a system where formal punishment is missing, that’s when the informal mechanisms step in,” said Jacquet. You can, for example, incarcerate an individual but, “it’s much more difficult, almost impossible to take away the liberty of an entire group like Exxon Mobil,” she explained. You can, however, shame them as climate activists do when they troll oil companies on Twitter. It’s about depriving these companies of their social license and reputation, which, in many cases, they worked very hard to create.

On the individual level, Jacquet points to the policies that some states have publishing the names of residents who owe a significant sum in taxes—in California, it’s more than $100,000; in Wisconsin, it’s $5,000, but those on the top 100 list all currently owe more than $400,000—as another example of effective shaming. The late taxpayers are given letters in advance of the list’s publication, with the expectation that the threat of exposure will get them to pony up (or at least enter into a repayment plan)—and it often does. When the state of Wisconsin launched its tax-shaming program in 2006, it thought it would recoup $1.5 million in its first year of operation; the state ultimately collected 15 times that in that year.

 

John Ioannides Takes A Hit For Questioning The Panicdemic Consensus

sciencebasedmedicine  |  As much as I used to admire him, since the pandemic hit John Ioannidis has consistently disappointed me to an extreme degree. In the last year, my disappointment with Prof. Ioannidis has gotten to the point where it’s hard for me to avoid lumping him with the COVID-19 minimizers/deniers like those who published and continue to promote the Great Barrington Declaration, one of whom was his co-author on his infamous Santa Clara seroprevalence study. The Great Barrington Declaration, boiled down to its essence, asserted that COVID-19 is not dangerous to the vast majority of the population, leading to its writers and signatories to conclude that governments should, in essence, let SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, run rampant through the population in order to achieve “natural herd immunity”, while putting in place measures designed to protect only those viewed as “at risk”, such as the elderly and those with significant co-morbidities. (Note that, at the time the Declaration was published, there was as yet no safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19, while now there are at least four.) Of course, as many noted, it is not possible to protect the vulnerable if COVID-19 is rampaging unchecked throughout the rest of the population. Also, as I noted when I wrote about it, the Great Barrington Declaration was the product of the American Institute for Economic Research, a right-wing, climate science-denying think tank, which recruited three ideologically—shall we say?—amenable scientists to sign on as authors of the declaration, which was basically, as I put it, “eugenics-adjacent” and full of misinformation and half-truths.

Moreover, I’m not the only one who’s now soured on Prof. Ioannidis. For example, Scientific American columnist John Horgan, someone with whom both Steve Novella and I have had disagreements based on his downplaying of skepticism in medicine with respect to homeopathy:

Optimism has also distorted my view of the coronavirus. Last March, I took heart from warnings by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis that we might be overestimating the deadliness of the virus and hence overreacting to it. He predicted that the U.S. death toll might reach only 10,000 people, lower than the average annual toll of seasonal flu. I wanted Ioannidis to be right, and his analysis seemed plausible to me, but his prediction turned out to be wrong by more than an order of magnitude.

Horgan didn’t go quite far enough in his criticisms for my taste, but such is life.

Then there’s Alex Rubinstein:

“What a weird turn to see John Ioannidis pushing one of sloppiest studies in the deluge of Covid-19 papers,” Alex Rubinsteyn, an assistant professor of computational medicine and genetics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, wrote on Twitter. “If he weren’t an author I would expect [the study] to show up in one of his talks as a particularly potent cocktail of bad research practices.”

Then, of course, there are all the scientists on Twitter criticizing Prof. Ioannidis. In fairness, one has to acknowledge that there are things Prof. Ioannidis has argued that have some merit. His estimates of IFR were closer to the mark than some of the very high estimates early in the pandemic, but they were still off considerably in the other direction. He was not wrong about the poor quality of so much of the data and research on COVID-19; it’s just, in an amazing feat of lacking self-awareness, he himself contributed to it as well.

This brings me back to that discussion of Ioannidis’ paper claiming that the NIH is too conservative and that only conservative, “safe” science is funded. It was more than that, though. He claimed that the scientists on NIH study sections were no better than scientists not on NIH study sections. Before I get to that, though, I note that Ioannidis’ cardinal sin since the pandemic started is not to have been wrong, even repeatedly so. It’s been his extreme arrogance:

Instead, Ioannidis sounded sure of himself. He was right; the others had it wrong. He called out other research teams by name—Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London—to berate their findings as “astronomically wrong,” and “constantly dialed back to match reality.” Here he was, about to come out with an exciting and important finding—if he were right, it could change almost everything about how we deal with this virus—and he seemed unworried by the possibility that something might be amiss with the project.

If anyone should understand how the pressure to contribute to the science of the crisis might lead to flawed work and exaggerated claims, it ought to be Ioannidis, arguably the world’s most famous epidemiologist. Who knows? Perhaps like so many of us, he’s just stressed out by the whole damned thing. Maybe he’s just off his game.

The article from which this quote came dates back to May 2020. Now, eleven months later with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think you can say that Ioannidis was “off his game”. With his attack on a graduate student, he’s continued to double down and, in fact, has even gone further than Freedman had previously described. That is what brings me back to my previous discussion of his article about those “safe” scientists at the NIH, with a funding process that he’d characterized as “conformity” and “mediocrity”. I wrote this over eight years ago:

In the end, as much as I admire Ioannidis, I think he’s off-base here. It’s not that I don’t agree that the NIH should try to find ways to fund more innovative research. However, Ioannidis’ approach to quantifying the problem seems to suffer from flaws in its very conception. In light of that, I can’t resist revisiting the discussion in my last post on the question of riskiness versus safety in research, and that’s a simple question: What’s the evidence that funding more risky research will result in better research and more treatments? We have lots of anecdotes of scientists whose ideas were later found to be validated and potentially game-changing who couldn’t get NIH funding, but how often does this really happen? As I’ve pointed out before, the vast majority of “wild” ideas are considered “wild” precisely because they are new and there is little good support for them. Once evidence accumulates to support them, they are no longer considered quite so “wild.” We know today that the scientists whose anecdotes of woe describing the depredations of the NIH were indeed onto something. How many more proposed ideas that seemed innovative at the time but ultimately went nowhere?

And my conclusion:

However, the assumption underlying Ioannidis’s analysis seems to be that there must be “bolts out of the blue” discovered by brilliant brave maverick scientists. It’s all very Randian at its heart. However, science is a collaborative enterprise, in which each scientist builds incrementally on the work of his or her predecessors. Bolts out of the blue are a good thing, but we can’t count on them, nor has anyone demonstrated that they are more likely to occur if the NIH funds “riskier research.” It’s equally likely that the end result would be a lot more dud research.

Maybe the problem with Prof. Ioannidis was there all along, and I just didn’t see it until the pandemic amplified it for all to see. He seems, dating back at least to 2012, have had the belief that conventional science is too “safe” and “conformist,” perhaps with a bit of a self-image of himself as being the “brave maverick doctor” or iconoclast. Maybe that’s why, during the pandemic, he was so easily drawn to being a “rebel” or a “contrarian,” whose findings bucked the existing consensus, and maybe that’s why he can’t give that up. After all, it’s happened to greater scientists than he. Moreover, Prof. Ioannidis seems to be an excellent cautionary tale at how being a critic doesn’t necessarily mean that you can do what’s being criticized that well. He’s very good at finding the flaws in studies, but his studies during the pandemic demonstrate that, when designing studies of his own, he’s prone to every bias and flaw that he criticizes in others.

In any event, I should go back and read some of Prof. Ioannidis’ old work in light of what I know about him now, with the realization that the pandemic has done me a favor. I wonder what I might find.

Sumbody Workin Really Hard To Get The Red Ants And The Black Ants Going...,

caitlinjohnstone |  A new viral video calling on liberals to form “an army of citizen detectives” to gather information on Trump supporters and report their activities to the authorities has racked up thousands of shares and millions of views in just a few hours.

The hashtag #TrumpsNewArmy is trending on Twitter as of this writing due to the release of a horrifying video with that title from successful author and virulent Russiagater Don Winslow. As of this writing it has some 20 thousand shares and 2.6 million views, and the comments and quote-retweets are predominantly supportive.

“On or before January 20th, Donald Trump will no longer be the Commander-in-Chief: he will lose control of the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Special Forces and America’s nuclear arsenal,” Winslow’s voice begins ominously. “On January 20th Donald Trump will become Commander-in-Chief of a different army: this army.”

Viewers are then shown footage from Trump rallies while being told that they are looking at “radical extreme conservatives, also known as domestic terrorists”.

“They are hidden among us, disguised behind regular jobs,” Winslow warns. “They are your children’s teachers. They work at supermarkets, malls, doctor’s offices, and many are police officers and soldiers.”

Winslow talks about white supremacists and the Capitol riot, warning that Trump will continue escalating violence and fomenting a civil war in America.

“We have to fight back,” Winslow declares. “In this new war, the battlefield has changes. Computers can be more valuable than guns. And this is what we need now more than ever: an army of citizen detectives. I’m proposing we form a citizen army. Our weapons will be computers and cellphones. We, who are monitoring extremists on the internet and reporting our findings to authorities. Remember, before the Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden, he had to be found. He was found by a CIA analyst working on a computer thousands of miles away. It’s up to you.”

The viral video is being loudly amplified by popular #Resistance accounts like Majid M Padellan (better known as Brooklyn Dad Defiant) with frighteningly paranoid and HUAC-like rhetoric.

America's Largest Labor Union Has Presided Over The Decline Of American Public Schools

influencewatch |   The National Education Association (NEA) is America’s largest labor union representing nearly three million employees, principally teachers. With affiliates in every state across 14,000 communities ^[1], NEA represents teachers, education support professionals, retired teachers, education faculty and staff, substitute teachers, and administrators.^[2] It exercises enormous political clout in everything from contract negotiations to issue advocacy and lobbying.^[3]

The NEA is a major political player, with its associated political action committees contributing nearly $143.5 million to federal candidates and committees—97% of which supported Democrats and liberals—from 1990 through February 2019. ^[4] The NEA is also deeply entangled in state and local politics and is a major contributor to left-of-center nonprofit organizations.^[5]

 

AFT's Randi Weingarten Would Protect A Dead Body In The Classroom...,

influencewatch |  The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is the second-largest teachers’ union in the United States. The union represents roughly 1.5 million members, most of whom work in teaching and education-related jobs as well as nursing.^[1] The union is a member of the AFL-CIO.

The AFT, like most public-sector unions, is a major player in liberal policy and Democratic Party politics. The union and union president Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten are associated with the Democracy Alliance network of liberal mega-donors.^[2] AFT and its associated political committees are also substantial contributors to Democratic candidates and party committees: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, those committees have spent upwards of $80 million on federal elections, with $79 million going to Democrats and left of center groups.^[3]

The union’s political positions focus on preserving privileges for teachers largely regardless of teacher quality. The AFT is a staunch defender of “tenure” policies that make it exceptionally difficult to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.^[4] Additionally, the union opposes many efforts to bring pension contributions and expenditures into long-run balance.^[5]

Numerous AFT local unions have been affected by serious corruption committed by senior officers in the local unions. The Washington Teachers Union, the United Teachers of Dade, and the Broward Teachers Union all suffered substantial financial losses from financial corruption committed by their officers.^[6] The AFT locals in Chicago and New York City have also been embroiled in highly controversial local politics.

Union president Randi Weingarten is a longtime union official, having served previously as president of the AFT-affiliated local teachers union in New York City, the United Federation of Teachers. In her work as New York’s teacher union president, Weingarten gained infamy for her aggressive defense of teachers awaiting dismissal hearings for misconduct in the city’s “rubber rooms.” One principal went so far as to suggest Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the classroom.”^[7]