And then there is this - still not under control
Strange thing. This WSJ story popped up on Twitter on their sidebar, then, while I was looking at it, disappeared and went 404.
Covid-19 Is Killing Hundreds of Pregnant Women and Babies in Brazil
Expectant mothers are at greater risk; doctors face agonizing decisions on when to deliver babies prematurely
Why are so many babies dying of Covid-19 in Brazil?
Vietnam’s ‘very dangerous’ new hybrid variant may be fueling its worst outbreak so far
The WHO is investigating reports of a mutation that spreads extremely quickly - but the country still isn’t on the UK’s red list
A Top Virologist in China, at Center of a Pandemic Storm, Speaks Out
The virologist, Shi Zhengli, said in a rare interview that speculation about her lab in Wuhan was baseless. But China’s habitual secrecy makes her claims hard to validate.
To a growing chorus of American politicians and scientists, she is the key to whether the world will ever learn if the virus behind the devastating Covid-19 pandemic escaped from a Chinese lab. To the Chinese government and public, she is a hero of the country’s success in curbing the epidemic and a victim of malicious conspiracy theories.
Shi Zhengli, a top Chinese virologist, is once again at the center of clashing narratives about her research on coronaviruses at a state lab in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic first emerged.
The idea that the virus may have escaped from a lab had long been widely dismissed by scientists as implausible and shunned by others for its connection with former President Donald J. Trump. But fresh scrutiny from the Biden administration and calls for greater candor from prominent scientists have brought the theory back to the fore.
Scientists generally agree that there is still no direct evidence to support the lab leak theory. But more of them now say that the hypothesis was dismissed too hastily, without a thorough investigation, and they point to a range of unsettling questions.
Some scientists say Dr. Shi conducted risky experiments with bat coronaviruses in labs that were not safe enough. Others want clarity on reports, citing American intelligence, suggesting that there were early infections of Covid-19 among several employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr. Shi has denied these accusations, and now finds herself defending the reputation of her lab and, by extension, that of her country. Reached on her cellphone two weeks ago, Dr. Shi said at first that she preferred not to speak directly with reporters, citing her institute’s policies. Yet she could barely contain her frustration.
“How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence?” she said, her voice rising in anger during the brief, unscheduled conversation. “I don’t know how the world has come to this, constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist,” she wrote in a text message.
In a rare interview over email, she denounced the suspicions as baseless, including the allegations that several of her colleagues may have been ill before the outbreak emerged.
The speculation boils down to one central question: Did Dr. Shi’s lab hold any source of the new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted? Dr. Shi’s answer is an emphatic no.
But China’s refusal to allow an independent investigation into her lab, or to share data on its research, make it difficult to validate Dr. Shi’s claims and has only fueled nagging suspicions about how the pandemic could have taken hold in the same city that hosts an institute known for its work on bat coronaviruses.
Those in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, though, have pointed to Wuhan’s role as a major transportation hub as well as a recent study that showed that just before the pandemic hit, the city’s markets were selling many animal species capable of harboring dangerous pathogens that could jump to humans.
The Chinese government has given no appearance of holding Dr. Shi under suspicion. Despite the international scrutiny, she seems to have been able to continue her research and give lectures in China.
The stakes in this debate extend into how scientists study infectious diseases. Some scientists have cited the lab leak scenario in pushing for greater scrutiny of “gain of function” experiments that, broadly defined, are intended to make pathogens more powerful to better understand their behavior and risks.
Many scientists say they want the hunt for the virus’s origins to transcend politics, borders and individual scientific achievements.
“This has nothing to do with fault or guilt,” said David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University and co-author of a recent letter in the journal Science, signed by 18 scientists, that called for a transparent investigation into all viable scenarios, including a lab leak. The letter urged labs and health agencies to open their records to the public.
“It’s just bigger than any one scientist or institute or any one country — anybody anywhere who has data of this sort needs to put it out there,” Dr. Relman said.
‘Transparency matters.’
Many virologists maintain that the coronavirus most likely jumped from an animal to a human in a setting outside a lab. But without direct proof of a natural spillover, more scientists and politicians have called for a full investigation into the lab leak theory.
Proponents of a lab investigation say that researchers at Dr. Shi’s institute could have collected — or contracted — the new coronavirus from the wild, such as in a bat cave. Or the scientists may have created it, by accident or by design. Either way, the virus could then have leaked from the laboratory, perhaps by infecting a worker.
China has sought to influence investigations into the virus’s origin, while promoting its own unproven allegations.
Beijing agreed to allow a team of World Health Organization experts to visit China, but limited their access. When the W.H.O. team said in a report in March that a lab leak was extremely unlikely, its conclusion was seen as hasty. Even the head of the W.H.O., Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: “I do not believe that this assessment was extensive enough.”
Last month, President Biden ordered intelligence agencies to investigate the origin question, including the lab theory. On Sunday, the leaders of the world’s wealthiest large democracies, at the Group of 7 summit, urged China to be part of a new investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. Mr. Biden told reporters that he and other leaders had discussed access to labs in China.
“Transparency matters across the board,” Mr. Biden said.
‘Scientists have a motherland.’
In less polarized times, Dr. Shi was a symbol of China’s scientific progress, at the forefront of research into emerging viruses.
She led expeditions into caves to collect samples from bats and guano, to learn how viruses jump from animals to humans. In 2019, she was among 109 scientists elected to the American Academy of Microbiology for her contributions to the field.
“She’s a stellar scientist — extremely careful, with a rigorous work ethic,” said Dr. Robert C. Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology employs nearly 300 people and is home to one of only two Chinese labs that have been given the highest security designation, Biosafety Level 4. Dr. Shi leads the institute’s work on emerging infectious diseases, and over the years, her group has collected over 10,000 bat samples from around China.
Under China’s centralized approach to scientific research, the institute answers to the Communist Party, which wants scientists to serve national goals. “Science has no borders, but scientists have a motherland,” Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, said in a speech to scientists last year.
Dr. Shi herself, though, does not belong to the Communist Party, according to official Chinese media reports, which is unusual for state employees of her status. She built her career at the institute, starting as a research assistant in 1990 and working her way up the ranks.
Dr. Shi, 57, obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Montpellier in France in 2000 and started studying bats in 2004 after the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which killed more than 700 people around the world. In 2011, she made a breakthrough when she found bats in a cave in southwestern China that carried coronaviruses that were similar to the virus that causes SARS.
“In all the work we do, if just once you can prevent the outbreak of an illness, then what we’ve done will be very meaningful,” she told CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, in 2017.
But some of her most notable findings have since drawn the heaviest scrutiny. In recent years, Dr. Shi began experimenting on bat coronaviruses by genetically modifying them to see how they behave.
In 2017, she and her colleagues at the Wuhan lab published a paper about an experiment in which they created new hybrid bat coronaviruses by mixing and matching parts of several existing ones — including at least one that was nearly transmissible to humans — in order to study their ability to infect and replicate in human cells.
Proponents of this type of research say it helps society prepare for future outbreaks. Critics say the risks of creating dangerous new pathogens may outweigh potential benefits.
The picture has been complicated by new questions about whether American government funding that went to Dr. Shi’s work supported controversial gain-of-function research. The Wuhan institute received around $600,000 in grant money from the United States government, through an American nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. The National Institutes of Health said it had not approved funding for the nonprofit to conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses that would have made them more infectious or lethal.
Dr. Shi, in an emailed response to questions, argued that her experiments differed from gain-of-function work because she did not set out to make a virus more dangerous, but to understand how it might jump across species.
“My lab has never conducted or cooperated in conducting GOF experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses,” she said.
‘Speculation rooted in utter distrust.’
Concerns have centered not only on what experiments Dr. Shi conducted, but also on the conditions under which she did them.
Some of Dr. Shi’s experiments on bat viruses were done in Biosafety Level 2 labs, where security is lower than in other labs at the institute. That has raised questions about whether a dangerous pathogen could have slipped out.
Ralph Baric, a prominent University of North Carolina expert in coronaviruses who signed the open letter in Science, said that although a natural origin of the virus was likely, he supported a review of what level of biosafety precautions were taken in studying bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute. Dr. Baric conducted N.I.H.-approved gain-of-function research at his lab at the University of North Carolina using information on viral genetic sequences provided by Dr. Shi.
Dr. Shi said that bat viruses in China could be studied in BSL-2 labs because there was no evidence that they directly infected humans, a view supported by some other scientists.
She also rejected recent reports that three researchers from her institute had sought treatment at a hospital in November 2019 for flulike symptoms, before the first Covid-19 cases were reported.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology has not come across such cases,” she wrote. “If possible, can you provide the names of the three to help us check?”
As for samples that the lab held, Dr. Shi has maintained that the closest bat virus she had in her lab, which she shared publicly, was only 96 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 — a vast difference by genomic standards. She rejects speculation that her lab had worked on other viruses in secret.
Dr. Shi’s research on a group of miners in Yunnan Province who suffered severe respiratory disease in 2012 has also drawn questions. The miners had worked in the same cave where Dr. Shi’s team later discovered the bat virus that is close to SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Shi said her lab did not detect bat SARS-like coronaviruses in the miners’ samples and that she would publish more details in a scientific journal soon; her critics say she has withheld information.
“This issue is too important not to come forward with everything you have and in a timely and transparent manner,” said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard who also signed the Science letter.
Many scientists and officials say China should share employees’ medical records and the lab’s logs of its experiments and its viral sequence database to evaluate Dr. Shi’s claims.
Dr. Shi said she and the institute had been open with the W.H.O. and with the global scientific community.
“This is no longer a question of science,” she said on the phone. “It is speculation rooted in utter distrust.”
‘I have nothing to fear.’
The pandemic was a moment that Dr. Shi and her team had long braced for. For years, she had warned of the risks of a coronavirus outbreak, building up a stock of knowledge about these pathogens.
In January of last year, as Dr. Shi and her team worked frantically, they were exhausted, but also excited, said Wang Linfa, a virologist at the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School who was in Wuhan with Dr. Shi at the time.
“All the experiences, reagents and the bat samples in the freezer were finally being used in a significant way globally,” said Dr. Wang, Dr. Shi’s collaborator and friend for 17 years.
Dr. Shi published some of the most important early papers on SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, which scientists around the world have relied on.
But soon, the speculation about Dr. Shi and her lab began to swirl. Dr. Shi, who is known among friends for being blunt, was baffled and angry — and sometimes let it show.
In an interview with Science magazine last July, she said that Mr. Trump owed her an apology for claiming the virus came from her lab. On social media, she said people who raised similar questions should “shut your stinky mouths.”
Dr. Shi said what she saw as the politicization of the question had sapped her of any enthusiasm for investigating the origins of the virus. She has instead focused on Covid vaccines and the features of the new virus, and over time, she said, has calmed down.
“I’m sure that I did nothing wrong,” she wrote. “So I have nothing to fear.”
Inside the extraordinary effort to save Trump from covid-19
His illness was more severe than the White House acknowledged at the time. Advisers thought it would alter his response to the pandemic. They were wrong.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar’s phone rang with an urgent request: Could he help someone at the White House obtain an experimental coronavirus treatment, known as a monoclonal antibody?
If Azar could get the drug, what would the White House need to do to make that happen? Azar thought for a moment. It was Oct. 1, 2020, and the drug was still in clinical trials. The Food and Drug Administration would have to make a “compassionate use” exception for its use since it was not yet available to the public. Only about 10 people so far had used it outside of those trials. Azar said of course he would help.
Azar wasn’t told who the drug was for but would later connect the dots. The patient was one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers: Hope Hicks.
A short time later, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn received a request from a top White House official for a separate case, this time with even greater urgency: Could he get the FDA to sign off on a compassionate-use authorization for a monoclonal antibody right away? There is a standard process that doctors use to apply to the FDA for unapproved drugs on behalf of patients dealing with life-threatening illnesses who have exhausted all other options, and agency scientists review it. The difference was that most people don’t call the commissioner directly.
The White House wanted Hahn to say yes within hours. Hahn, who still did not know who the application was for, consulted career officials. The FDA needs to go by the book, the officials insisted. Hahn relayed the message back to the White House. They kept pressing him to effectively cut corners. No, we can’t do that, Hahn told them several times. We’re talking about someone’s life. We have to actually examine the application to make sure we’re doing it safely.
When Hahn later learned the effort was on behalf of the president, he was stunned. For God’s sake, he thought, it’s the president who’s sick, and you want us to bend the rules? Trump was in the highest-risk category for severe disease from covid-19 — at 74, he rarely exercised and was considered medically obese. He was the type of patient with whom you would want to take every possible precaution. As it did with all compassionate-use applications, the FDA made a decision within 24 hours. Agency officials scrambled to figure out which company’s monoclonal antibody would be most appropriate given the clinical information they had, and selected the one from Regeneron, known simply as Regen-Cov.
A five-day stretch in October 2020 — from the moment White House officials began an extraordinary effort to get Trump lifesaving drugs to the day the president returned to the White House from the hospital — marked a dramatic turning point in the nation’s flailing coronavirus response. Trump’s brush with severe illness and the prospect of death caught the White House so unprepared that they had not even briefed Vice President Mike Pence’s team on a plan to swear him in if Trump became incapacitated.
For months, the president had taunted and dodged the virus, flouting safety protocols by holding big rallies and packing the White House with maskless guests. But just one month before the election, the virus that had already killed more than 200,000 Americans had sickened the most powerful person on the planet.
Trump’s medical advisers hoped his bout with the coronavirus, which was far more serious than acknowledged at the time, would inspire him to take the virus seriously. Perhaps now, they thought, he would encourage Americans to wear masks and put his health and medical officials front and center in the response. Instead, Trump emerged from the experience triumphant and ever more defiant. He urged people not to be afraid of the virus or let it dominate their lives, disregarding that he had had access to health care and treatments unavailable to other Americans.
It was, several advisers said, the last chance to turn the response around. And once the opportunity passed, it was the point of no return.
An ill president
The week leading up to Trump’s infection was frenzied, even by his standards. On Saturday, Sept. 26, he had hosted a party with scores of maskless attendees to announce Amy Coney Barrett as his pick for Supreme Court justice. The celebrations had continued indoors, where most people remained maskless. By that time, the virus was surging again, but Trump’s contempt for face coverings had turned into unofficial White House policy. He actually asked aides who wore them in his presence to take them off. If someone was going to do a news conference with him, he made clear that he or she was not to wear a mask by his side.
The day after the Supreme Court celebration, Trump had also hosted military families at the White House. At Trump’s insistence, few were wearing masks, but they were packed in a little too tight for his comfort. He wasn’t worried about others getting sick, but he did fret about his own vulnerability and complained to his staff afterward. Why were they letting people get so close to him? Meeting with the Gold Star families was sad and moving, he said, but added, “If these guys had covid, I’m going to get it because they were all over me.” He told his staff that they needed to do a better job of protecting him.
Two days after that, he flew to Cleveland for the first presidential debate against his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. Trump was erratic that whole evening, and he seemed to deteriorate as the night went on. The pundits’ verdicts were brutal.
Almost 48 hours later, Trump became terribly ill. Hours after his tweet announcing he and first lady Melania Trump had coronavirus infections, the president began a rapid spiral downward. His fever spiked, and his blood oxygen level fell below 94 percent, at one point dipping into the 80s. Sean Conley, the White House physician, attended the president at his bedside. Trump was given oxygen in an effort to stabilize him.
The doctors gave Trump an eight-gram dose of two monoclonal antibodies through an intravenous tube. That experimental treatment was what had required the FDA’s sign-off. He was also given a first dose of the antiviral drug remdesivir, also by IV. That drug was authorized for use but still hard to get for many patients because it was in short supply.
Typically, doctors space out treatments to measure a patient’s response. Some drugs, such as monoclonal antibodies, are most effective if they’re administered early in the course of an infection. Others, such as remdesivir, are most effective when they’re given later, after a patient has become critically ill. But Trump’s doctors threw everything they could at the virus all at once. His condition appeared to stabilize somewhat as the day wore on, but his doctors, still fearing he might need to go on a ventilator, decided to move him to the hospital. It was too risky at that point to stay at the White House.
Many White House officials and even his closest aides were kept in the dark about his condition. But after they woke up to the news — many of them were asleep when Trump tweeted at nearly 1 a.m. on Friday that he had the virus — Cabinet officials and aides lined up at the White House to get tested. A large number had met with him the previous week to brief him about various issues or had traveled with him to the debate.
It was unclear even to Trump’s closest aides just how sick he was. Was he mildly ill, as he and Conley were saying, or was he sicker than they all knew? Trump was supposed to join a call with nursing home representatives later that day as part of his official calendar. Officials had been scheduled to do it in person from the White House, but that morning they were informed the call would be done remotely. Trump’s aides insisted that he would still be on it.
As one aide waited in line for a coronavirus test, she saw Conley sprint out of his office with a panicked look. That’s strange, the aide thought. An hour or two later, officials were informed that Pence would be joining the nursing homes call. Trump couldn’t make it.
‘Like a miracle’
Trump’s condition worsened early Saturday. His blood oxygen level dropped to 93 percent, and he was given the powerful steroid dexamethasone, which is usually administered if someone is extremely ill (the normal blood oxygen level is between 95 and 100 percent). The drug was believed to improve survival in coronavirus patients receiving supplemental oxygen. The president was on a dizzying array of emergency medicines by now — all at once.
Throughout Trump’s time in the hospital, his doctors consulted with the medical experts on the White House coronavirus task force whom the president had long ago discarded. They talked to Hahn, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, seeking input about his treatment.
Trump and his aides had ignored numerous warnings from the task force doctors that they were putting themselves and everyone in the West Wing at risk by their cavalier behavior. Over the past eight months, Trump had come dangerously close to the virus a number of times. Those repeated escapes had made the White House more careless, constantly tempting fate. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, and Redfield wrote to top aides after every White House outbreak, warning them that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was not safe. Birx took her concerns to Pence directly. This is dangerous, she told him. If White House staff can’t or won’t wear masks, they need to be more than 10 feet away from one another. This is just too risky.
Their warnings had gone unheeded, and now some would pay a price. Trump hadn’t wanted to go to the hospital, but his aides had spelled out the choice: He could go to the hospital Friday, while he could still walk on his own, or he could wait until later, when the cameras could capture him in a wheelchair or gurney. There would be no hiding his condition then.
At least two of those who were briefed on Trump’s medical condition that weekend said he was gravely ill and feared that he wouldn’t make it out of Walter Reed. People close to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said he was consumed with fear that Trump might die.
It was unclear if one of the medications, or their combination, helped, but by Saturday afternoon Trump’s condition began improving. One of the people familiar with Trump’s medical information was convinced the monoclonal antibodies were responsible for the president’s quick recovery.
Throughout the day Saturday, Oct. 3, the restless Trump made a series of phone calls to gauge how his hospitalization was being received by the public. In all likelihood, the steroid he was taking had given him a burst of energy, though no one knew how long it would last. Perhaps buoyed by that, Trump continued to post on Twitter from the hospital, anxious to convey that he was upright and busy. At one point Trump even called Fauci to discuss his condition and share his personal assessment of the monoclonal antibodies he had received. He said it was miraculous how quickly they made him feel much better.
“This is like a miracle,” Trump told his campaign adviser Jason Miller in another one of his calls from the hospital. “I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t feeling that great.”
Waiting for a sign
Redfield spent the weekend Trump was sick praying. He prayed the president would recover. He prayed that he would emerge from the experience with a newfound appreciation for the seriousness of the threat. And he prayed that Trump would tell Americans they should listen to public health advisers before it was too late. The virus had begun a violent resurgence. Redfield, Fauci, Birx and others felt they had limited time to persuade people to behave differently if they were going to avoid a massive wave of death.
There were few signs that weekend that Trump would have a change of heart. It had already been a battle to get him to agree to go to Walter Reed in the first place. Now, he was badgering Conley and others to let him go home early. Redfield heard Trump was insisting on being discharged and called Conley on the phone. The president can’t go home this early, Redfield advised the doctor. He was a high-risk patient, and there were no guarantees that he wouldn’t backslide or experience some complication. (Many covid-19 patients seemed to be on an upswing and then quickly deteriorated.) Trump needed to stay in the hospital until that risk had passed. Conley agreed but said the president had made up his mind and couldn’t be convinced otherwise.
If they couldn’t keep him in the hospital, the advisers hoped that Trump would at least emerge from Walter Reed a changed man. Some even began mentally preparing to finally speak their minds. It would surely be the inflection point, they all thought. There’s nothing like a near-death experience to serve as a wake-up call. It was, at the end of the day, a national security failure. The president had not been protected. If this fiasco wasn’t the turning point, what would be?
Just as the country had been watching a few days before, many people tuned in again as Trump took Marine One back to the White House’s South Lawn on Monday night. They saw him step out in a navy suit, white shirt and blue-striped tie, with a medical mask on his face. He walked along the grass before climbing the steps to a balcony.
But Trump didn’t go inside. It was a moment of political theater too good to pass up — as suffused with triumph as his trip Friday had been humbling. He turned from the center of the balcony and looked back toward Marine One and the television cameras. It was clear that he was breathing heavily from the long walk and the climb up the flight of stairs.
Redfield was watching on television from home. He was praying as Trump went up the steps. Praying that he would reach the balcony and show some humility. That he would remind people that anyone could be susceptible to the coronavirus — even the president, the first lady and their son. That he would tell them how they could protect themselves and their loved ones.
But Trump didn’t waver. Facing the cameras from the balcony, he used his right hand to unhook the mask loop from his right ear, then raised his left hand to pull the mask off his face. He was heavily made up, his face more orange tinted than in the photos from the hospital. The helicopter’s rotors were still spinning. He put the mask into his right pocket, as if he was discarding it once and for all, then raised both hands in a thumbs-up. He was still probably contagious, standing there for all the world to see. He made a military salute as the helicopter departed the South Lawn, and then strode into the White House, passing staffers on his way and failing to protect them from the virus particles emitted from his nose and mouth.
Right then, Redfield knew it was over. Trump showed in that moment that he hadn’t changed at all. The pandemic response wasn’t going to change, either.
Pfizer is about to seek U.S. authorization for a third dose of its COVID-19 vaccine, saying Thursday that another shot within 12 months could dramatically boost immunity and maybe help ward off the latest worrisome coronavirus mutant.
The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man
In a crowded field of wrongness, one person stands out: Alex Berenson.
The pandemic has made fools of many forecasters. Just about all of the predictions whiffed. Anthony Fauci was wrong about masks. California was wrong about the outdoors. New York was wrong about the subways. I was wrong about the necessary cost of pandemic relief. And the Trump White House was wrong about almost everything else.
In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we’ve surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can).
Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News’ most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight , he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S.
The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them. As his conspiratorial nonsense accelerates toward the pandemic’s finish line, he has proved himself the Secretariat of being wrong:
- He has blamed the vaccines for causing spikes in severe illness, by pointing to data that actually demonstrate their safety and effectiveness.
- He has blamed the vaccines for suppressing our immune systems, by misrepresenting normal immune-system behavior.
- He has suggested that countries such as Israel have suffered from their early vaccine rollout, even though deaths and hospitalizations among vaccinated groups in Israel have plummeted.
- He has implied that for most non-seniors, the side effects of the vaccines are worse than having COVID-19 itself—even though, according to the CDC, the pandemic has killed tens of thousands of people under 50 and the vaccines have not conclusively killed anybody.
Usually, I would refrain from lavishing attention on someone so blatantly incorrect. But with vaccine resistance hovering around 30 percent of the general population, and with 40 percent of Republicans saying they won’t get a shot, debunking vaccine skepticism, particularly in right-wing circles, is a matter of life and death.
Berenson’s TV appearances are more misdirection than outright fiction, and his Twitter feed blends internet-y irony and scientific jargon in a way that may obscure what he’s actually saying. To pin him down, I emailed several questions to him last week. Below, I will lay out, as clearly and fairly as I can, his claims about the vaccines and how dangerously, unflaggingly, and superlatively wrong they are.
Before I go point by point through his wrong positions, let me be exquisitely clear about what is true . The vaccines work. They worked in the clinical trials, and they’re working around the world. The vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson seem to provide stronger and more lasting protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants than natural infection. They are excellent at reducing symptomatic infection. Even better, they are extraordinarily successful at preventing severe illness from COVID-19. Countries that have vaccinated large percentages of their population quickly, such as the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Israel, have all seen sharp and sustained declines in hospitalizations among the elderly. Meanwhile, countries that have lagged in the vaccination effort—including the U.K.’s neighbors France and Italy, and Israel’s neighbor Jordan—have struggled to contain the virus. The authorized vaccines are marvels, and the case against them relies on half-truths, untruths, and obfuscations.
Berenson’s claim: In country after country, “cases rise after vaccination campaigns begin,” he wrote in an email.
The reality: In country after country, cases decline after vaccination campaigns begin.
One of Berenson’s themes is that the mRNA vaccines are badly underperforming outside the clinical trials and are possibly even causing a spike in cases after the first shot. But just this week, CDC researchers studying real-world conditions came to the opposite conclusion: The mRNA vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer are 90 percent effective two weeks after the second dose, in line with the trial data. “COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all eligible persons,” they concluded.
Still, Berenson pushes the argument that the vaccines are causing suspicious illness and death. On Twitter and in his email to me, Berenson claimed that an “excellent” Denmark study showed a 40 percent rise in infections immediately after nursing-home residents received their first vaccine shot.
I reached out to that study’s lead author, Ida Rask Moustsen-Helms at the Statens Serum Institut, who said that Berenson had mischaracterized her findings. She explained to me that the Danish nursing homes in question were already experiencing a significant COVID-19 outbreak when vaccinations began. Many people in the long-term-care facilities were likely already sick before their vaccine was administered, and “these people would technically count as vaccinated with confirmed COVID-19, even if the infection happened prior to the vaccination or its immune response,” she said. With limited vaccines, countries ought to give the first vaccines to the groups most likely to get COVID-19. That’s exactly what seems to have happened here. Berenson is scaremongering about the vaccines by essentially criticizing their wise distribution.
In our emails, Berenson further argued that many of the perceived benefits of the vaccines are illusory. “It is very hard to distinguish the course of the epidemic this winter in countries that have vaccinated heavily, such as Israel and the UK, and those that have not, such as Canada and Germany,” he wrote.
This is hogwash. In the U.K. and Israel, hospitalizations have fallen by at least 70 percent since mid-January, and they remain low. In Canada, hospitalizations fell by significantly less, and in Germany, the seven-day average of COVID-19 cases has more than doubled since mid-February; its government has debated a new lockdown.
This stage of the pandemic is a race between the variants and the vaccines. In many states, such as Michigan and New York, normalizing behavior combined with more contagious strains of the virus are pushing up cases again. This is not evidence that America’s vaccination campaign isn’t working. Quite the opposite: It highlights the urgency of moving faster to deliver vaccines, which are our best chance to control the spread of contagious variants.
Berenson’s claim: Pfizer-BioNTech’s clinical-trial data prove that the companies are being shady about vaccine efficacy.
The reality: His “proof” is a total mischaracterization of trial data.
Berenson seems to enjoy spelunking through research to find esoteric statistics that he then dresses up with spooky language to make confusing points that sow doubt about the vaccines. Arguing that COVID-19 cases spike after the first dose, he directs people to the Pfizer-BioNTech FDA briefing document, which reports hundreds of “suspected but unconfirmed” COVID-19 cases in the trial’s vaccine group that aren’t counted as positive cases in the final efficacy analysis.
But “suspected but unconfirmed” doesn’t refer to participants who were probably sick with COVID-19. On the contrary, it refers to participants who reported various symptoms, such as a cough or a sore throat, and then took a PCR test— and then that test came back negative.
“His point is absolutely stupid, and I would know because I enrolled participants in the Pfizer-BioNTech trial,” Kawsar Talaat, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “He’s talking about people who call in and say, ‘I have a runny nose.’ So we mark them as ‘suspected.’ Then we ask them to take a PCR test, and we test their swab, and if the test comes back negative, the FDA says it’s ‘unconfirmed.’ That’s what suspected but unconfirmed means.”
When I emailed Pfizer and BioNTech representatives about Berenson’s claim, they struggled to even understand what I was talking about. Someone was taking a group of several thousand people who had tested negative for COVID-19 and, from afar, diagnosing all of them with COVID-19? “Does not make sense,” a BioNTech spokesperson responded curtly.
If you were enrolled in Berenson’s vaccine trial for SARS-CoV-2 and never contracted the virus, but one day you told a clinician that you had a bit of a cough, Berenson would mark you down as “infected with COVID-19” and blame the vaccine. That’s the logic here, and, as you can tell, it’s not really logic; it just seems like an attempt to find something—anything—wrong with the vaccines.
Berenson’s claim: The mRNA vaccines dangerously suppress your immune system, possibly causing severe illness and even death.
The reality: His claim is based on a total misunderstanding of how the immune system works.
Berenson wrote in an email that “the first dose of the mRNA vaccine temporarily suppresses the immune system.” He has claimed on Twitter that the mRNA vaccines “transiently suppress lymphocytes,” or our white blood cells, and suggested that this might lead to “post-vaccination deaths.”
Scientists tore this one to shreds. “The claim he is making is simply fearmongering, connecting a simple physiological event with bogus claims of deaths,” Shane Crotty, a researcher at the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told me. “The observation of lymphocyte numbers temporarily dropping in blood is actually a common phenomenon in immune responses.”
Renee DiResta: Anti-vaxxers think this is their moment
A little background is useful here: White blood cells are the immune system’s scouts. After an effective vaccination, some of them leave the blood and go to the site of inflammation, such as the arm that received the shot. “The cells are not gone,” Crotty said. “They come back to the blood in a few days. It is generally a good sign of an immune response, not the opposite.” To demonstrate that the vaccines are counterproductive, then, Berenson is pointing to the very biological mechanism that strongly suggests they’re working just as scientists expected.
Readers are surely familiar with other biological events that sound bad in the short term but are part of a normal, healthy process. When you lift weights at the gym, your muscles experience small tears that recover and then strengthen over time. Imagine if some loudmouth started screaming in the middle of the weight room, “You all think you’re building your muscles, but actually you’re tearing them to shreds, and it could kill you!” You would probably carry on calmly, assuming that this guy just got a little overexcited after finding a Yahoo Answers article about muscle formation and stopped reading after the first paragraph. Berenson’s claim is basically a version of that, but for your immune system.
“Actually,” Talaat said, “his argument is even worse than your analogy. Muscles really do tear at the gym. But lymphocytes don’t go away. They just move. What he’s describing as dangerous in these tweets is just the regular functioning of our immune system.”
Berenson’s claim: In Israel, the shots are causing a scary number of deaths and hospitalizations.
The reality: Israel is a sensational vaccine success story: a nearly open economy where COVID-19 rates are plunging. See for yourself!
On February 11, Berenson warned his followers that early data from Israel proved that vaccine advocates “need to start ratcheting down expectations.” This was a strange claim to make at the time: An Israeli health-care provider had reported no deaths and four severe cases among its first 523,000 fully vaccinated people. But the claim seems even more ridiculous now, in light of Israel’s incredible success since then. New positive cases in Israel are down roughly 95 percent since January. Deaths have plunged, even though the economy is almost fully open.
When I asked Berenson to explain his beef with Israel’s vaccine record, he sent a link to a news story in Hebrew that, he said, reported “several hundred deaths and hospitalizations and thousands of infections in people who have received both doses.” I can’t read Hebrew, so I reached out to someone who can, Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel. He replied by email: “This link actually shows that the vast majority of those who died were NOT vaccinated.” By Segal’s calculations, the vaccines have reduced the risk of death by more than 90 percent in the Israeli population. Segal also said that “numbers of infections only went down, and even more so among the age groups who were first to vaccinate.”
Berenson is wrong about all sorts of little things when it comes to Israel, but I want to emphasize how straightforward and obvious the big picture is here. Israel is a world leader in vaccinations. Its COVID-19 cases have plunged, and its economy is roaring back to life.
Berenson’s claim: Healthy people under 70 shouldn’t get a vaccine.
The reality: Outside of extremely rare cases, every adult should get a vaccine—and if it’s authorized for children, children should get it too.
I wanted to know where Berenson stood on the most important question: Who does he think should get a vaccine, and who does he think shouldn’t? This was the core of his answer:
For most healthy people under 50—and certainly under 35—the side effects from the shots are likely to be worse than a case of Covid. Over 70, sure. The grey zone is somewhere in the middle and probably depends on personal risk factors.
This response has two huge problems. First, although the disease clearly gets more severe with age, drawing a line at 70 is nonsensical. Those in their 50s and early 60s are three times more likely to die from this disease than a 40-something, and 400 times more likely to die than a teenager, according to the CDC.
Second, the suggestion that the vaccine’s side effects are worse than having COVID-19 is ludicrous. The vaccine can cause chills, fever, and other symptoms in the first few days. That’s just the immune system doing its job; severe illness from the vaccines is vanishingly rare. But severe illness in a pandemic is not rare. Based on data from COVID-NET, a surveillance network that captures hospitalizations across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of people under age 50 have likely gone to the hospital with COVID-19.* Several studies have indicated that at least one-third of hospitalized people suffer from long-term symptoms of COVID-19. (Guess what seems to alleviate the symptoms of some of these patients? Getting vaccinated.)
The idea that the vaccine is worse than the disease for the under-70 crowd falls apart utterly when we consider the “side effect” of death. Roughly 100,000 people under 65 have died of COVID-19. Meanwhile, out of more than 145 million vaccines administered in the U.S., a CDC review of clinical information found no evidence that they had caused any deaths. The current score in the competition between non-senior pandemic deaths and conclusive vaccine deaths is 100,000–0.
One hundred thousand to zero . That might be the most important statistic in this whole mess. Berenson doesn’t tweet blatantly falsifiable statements about the vaccines every day. For the most part, he peddles doubt, laced with confusing and expert-sounding jargon, which may seem compelling at first but can’t survive contact with expert opinion.
To be honest, I initially had serious doubts about publishing this piece. The trap of exposing conspiracy theories is obvious: To demonstrate why a theory is wrong, you have to explain it and, in doing so, incur the risk that some people will be convinced by the very theory you’re trying to debunk. But that horse has left the barn. More than half of Republicans under the age of 50 say they simply won’t get a vaccine. Their hesitancy is being fanned by right-wing hacks, Fox News showboats, and vaccine skeptics like Alex Berenson. The case for the vaccines is built upon a firm foundation of scientific discovery, clinical-trial data, and real-world evidence. The case against the vaccines wobbles because it is built upon a steaming pile of bullshit.
*This piece has been updated to clarify the number of people under age 50 who have likely been hospitalized with COVID-19.
Majority of Covid misinformation came from 12 people, report finds
CCDH finds ‘disinformation dozen’ have combined following of 59 million people across multiple social media platforms
The vast majority of Covid-19 anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories originated from just 12 people, a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) cited by the White House this week found.
CCDH, a UK/US non-profit and non-governmental organization, found in March that these 12 online personalities they dubbed the “disinformation dozen” have a combined following of 59 million people across multiple social media platforms, with Facebook having the largest impact. CCDH analyzed 812,000 Facebook posts and tweets and found 65% came from the disinformation dozen. Vivek Murthy, US surgeon general, and Joe Biden focused on misinformation around vaccines this week as a driving force of the virus spreading.
On Facebook alone, the dozen are responsible for 73% of all anti-vaccine content, though the vaccines have been deemed safe and effective by the US government and its regulatory agencies. And 95% of the Covid misinformation reported on these platforms were not removed.
Among the dozen are physicians that have embraced pseudoscience, a bodybuilder, a wellness blogger, a religious zealot, and, most notably Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nephew of John F Kennedy who has also linked vaccines to autism and 5G broadband cellular networks to the coronavirus pandemic.
Kennedy was since removed from Instagram, which Facebook owns, but not from Facebook itself.
“Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies,” wrote CCDH’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, in the report. “All have been particularly ineffective at removing harmful and dangerous misinformation about coronavirus vaccines.”
Although platforms have since taken measures to remove many posts and even remove three of the 12 from one platform, the CCDH is calling on Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to completely deplatform the disinformation dozen they believe are dangerous and instrumental in creating vaccine hesitancy at a crucial moment in the pandemic.
“Updated policies and statements hold little value unless they are strongly and consistently enforced,” the report said. “With the vast majority of harmful content being spread by a select number of accounts, removing those few most dangerous individuals and groups can significantly reduce the amount of disinformation being spread across platforms.”
There is also a slideshow as part of the article.
Linda Zuern, an unvaccinated Trump supporter and member of her local Massachusetts Republican Party who spread coronavirus conspiracy theories, dies of COVID-19.
Fox does a 180 on the vaccine:
From Dr. Tom Frieden - former CDC chief on Covid/Delta variant and other strains
Why Republicans suddenly seem to be taking COVID seriously
Vaccine advocacy from Hannity and McConnell gets the media off Republicans’ backs, but won’t shift public sentiment
Amid a rising media furor over the steady stream of vaccine disparagement from GOP politicians and Fox News talking heads, a number of prominent Republicans spoke up in favor of vaccines early this week.
On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “shots need to get in everybody’s arm as rapidly as possible” and asked that people “ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.” House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, got the vaccine after months of delay and then publicly said, “there shouldn’t be any hesitancy over whether or not it’s safe and effective.” And Fox News host Sean Hannity, in a widely shared video, declared, it “absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.” This was treated in the press as an unequivocal endorsement, even though the use of the word “many” was clearly meant to let the Fox News viewers feel like he’s talking about other people getting vaccinated.
Is this an exciting pivot among the GOP elites? Are they abandoning the sociopathic strategy of sabotaging President Joe Biden’s anti-pandemic plan by encouraging their own followers to get sick? Are the millions of Republicans who keep telling pollsters they will never get that Democrat shot going to change their minds now?
Ha ha ha, no.
All this shows is that GOP politicians and pundits still know how to manipulate the mainstream press’s endless desire to believe the Republicans aren’t really as bad as the #resistance tweeters are saying. But while clips of prominent Republicans saying pro-vaccine stuff might be enough to get the press off their backs — or keep Biden from accusing them of “killing people,” as he did (correctly) to Facebook — it won’t be enough to actually get vaccine-hostile Republican voters to change their minds. Indeed, this should be understood more as a P.R. move to quell press criticism than a sincere effort to get reluctant people to get vaccinated.
Unlike most journalists — who merely watch clips from Fox News, often ones pre-selected for them by the Fox News P.R. team — Matt Gertz at Media Matters and Aaron Rupar at Vox actually put in the miserable work of watching entire shows on the network. And both reported on Tuesday that, despite the hype around Hannity’s viral clip, the overall tenor of Fox News this week has still been that getting the vaccine is a very bad thing that no red-blooded Republican worth his MAGA hat should ever do. Indeed, the out-of-context Hannity clip comes from an episode that was overall anti-vaccine. The Hannity clip “came in the middle of a segment in which he railed against colleges and universities that are requiring their students to get their shots,” Gertz writes. He also points out that Hannity’s show “is bracketed between those of Carlson and Laura Ingraham,” and both of those hosts went hard on the vaccines-are-terrible-and-doctors-are-lying-to-you messaging.
As Rupar points out, “the viral clip of Hannity talking about vaccines came immediately before he pivoted to a story about a college athlete who was temporarily paralyzed after she took a different sort of vaccine in 2019.”
Similarly, Fox morning host Steve Doocy got good press for encouraging vaccines, but, as both Rupar and Gertz point out, it was in a segment where his co-host Brian Kilmeade framed vaccine refusal in terms of “freedom” and told viewers “make your own decision.” The actual message one gets from watching the whole segment: People who get vaccines are sheep, and “free” people who make their own decisions can prove it by refusing the vaccine. So while liberals and journalists were swooning over Hannity’s supposedly reasonable tone from the clip they saw on Twitter, actual Fox News viewers were getting a very different message: Vaccines are dangerous and evil and unpatriotic and don’t you dare get the COVID-19 shot.
Pro-vaccine messages from Republican politicians should be taken with a similar grain of salt.
McConnell’s words mean nothing to the GOP base, which he likely understands. After all, he’s hardly a popular figure with the base, like Donald Trump or their beloved Fox News pundits. He’s mostly viewed in GOP circles as a charisma-free villain who is good for obstructing Democrats, but not exactly someone people swoon over. Where McConnell has real power is as the leader of the Republican caucus in the Senate. On that front, he appears to be doing nothing to improve the situation. He’s well aware of prominent members of his caucus are out there, stoking conspiracy theories and discouraging vaccination. He seems wholly uninterested in doing anything substantive to discourage the behavior. Indeed, the junior senator from his home state of Kentucky, Sen. Rand Paul, is one of the most prominent COVID-19 minimizers on Capitol Hill. While McConnell was giving his limp pro-vaccine statements, Paul was getting into a far more exciting tiff with top Biden health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate hearing. It’s quite likely Republicans understand that clips that can be used to demonize Fauci — and therefore demonizing the vaccine Fauci promotes — will likely get a lot more interest from the GOP base than anything McConnell has to say.
Indeed, this looks very much like a two-pronged strategy, where the Beltway press gets a “GOP loves the vaccine” message, while the actual base is still getting blasted with a “vaccines are bad” message. Scalise getting the shot is part of this. Scalise is famous to journalists since he’s the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House. But most of the GOP base probably couldn’t pick him out of a crowd, even after being reminded he was the guy that was shot by the unhinged Bernie Sanders supporter in 2017. So while it’s a very big deal to the Beltway press that Scalise is getting Pfizered, the typical GOP voter will neither know nor care.
The good news is that some in the mainstream press are suspecting this might be more of the usual GOP media manipulation.
After an initial bout of gushing praise for this supposed “pivot,” some of the coverage has noticeably shifted in a more skeptical direction. CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter noted that while as “optimist might say, innocently, that the Fox machine is raising awareness about vaccines,” a “cynic might say that Fox is trying to score PR points.” (And only fools fail to be cynics when it comes to Fox News coverage.) The New York Times headlines Wednesday morning highlighted that “G.O.P. Lawmakers Allow Vaccine Skepticism to Flourish” and the “mixed messages” on Fox News.
Unfortunately, the Washington Post is still going with the credulous headline, “Growing number of Republicans urge vaccinations amid delta surge.” The rhetoric is portrayed as a “shift,” even though there’s no evidence that the most popular anti-vaccination voices out there have any intention of backing down, much less admitting they were wrong.
This is almost certainly not a “shift.” It is mostly an ass-covering exercise by Republicans who want to confuse the press about who, exactly, is to blame for the low rates of vaccinations among GOP voters. Journalists should not be snookered by this. It’s very unlikely we’ll see a sudden spike in vaccination rates, which is what would happen if the “Republicans get vaccinated now” message was actually getting through to the people who need to hear it. Instead, we’ll likely see the rate stay steady or even continue to decline.
I hope that I’m wrong, of course. Still, Republican voters may be rubes, but they are better at interpreting “mixed messages” from GOP elites than the press is, and they know they’re meant to hear the anti-vaccine messages while disregarding the pro-vaccine ones. Republican elites haven’t suddenly grown a heart. It’s just a lot harder to pin the blame for the continuing pandemic on Biden if the press is, correctly, blaming Republicans for it. What we’re seeing is likely just Republicans getting the media off their scent, and not a move that will do much, if anything, to get more shots in arms.
