During an ABC News townhall event moderated by George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump once again downplayed the benefits of wearing protective face masks. But when Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday morning, he stressed that face masks are enormously helpful tools in the fight against coronavirus.
Asked about Trump’s comments, Redfield told senators, “I’m not going to comment directly about the president, but I am going to comment as the CDC director that these face masks are the most important, powerful health tool we have. And I will continue to appeal for all Americans — all individuals in our country — to embrace these face coverings. I’ve said it: if we did it for six, eight, ten, 12 weeks, we’d bring this pandemic under control.”
Holding up a blue face mask, Redfield added, “We have clear scientific evidence: they work, and they are our best defense. I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”
Redfield explained that when a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available in the future, “If I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine’s not going to protect me. This face mask will. So, I do want to keep asking the American public to take the responsibility — particularly the 18-25-year-olds….. We haven’t got the acceptance, the personal responsibility that we need for all Americans to embrace this face mask.”
In 1955, after a field trial involving 1.8 million Americans, the world’s first successful polio vaccine was declared “safe, effective, and potent.”
It was arguably the most significant biomedical advance of the past century. Despite the polio vaccine’s long-term success, manufacturers, government leaders and the nonprofit that funded the vaccine’s development made several missteps.
Having produced a documentary about the polio vaccine’s field trials, we believe the lessons learned during that chapter in medical history are worth considering as the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines proceeds.
Trailer from ‘The Shot Felt ‘Round the World,’ a documentary about the polio vaccine.
Sabin and Salk
Today, many competing efforts are underway to create a coronavirus vaccine, each employing different methods to generate the production of universally needed antibodies. Likewise, in the 1950s there were different approaches to making a polio vaccine.
The prevailing medical orthodoxy, led by Dr. Albert Sabin, held that only a live-virus vaccine, which involved using a weakened form of the polio virus to stimulate antibodies, could work. That theory stemmed from work by the physician Edward Jenner, who in the 1700s determined that milkmaids exposed to the cowpox virus-laden pus of cowpox-infected cattle did not catch smallpox. Smallpox was the deadly pandemic of the era, and this discovery led to a vaccine that brought about the disease’s eradication.
Jonas Salk, a doctor and scientist based at the University of Pittsburgh, on the other hand, believed a killed virus, which would completely lose its infectious qualities, could still trick the body into creating protective antibodies against the polio virus.
A nonprofit organization, the National Infantile Paralysis Foundation, funded and thus directed the polio vaccine quest. Established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former law partner, Basil O’ Connor, it raised money for polio research and treatment. As part of this fundraising effort, Americans were called upon to send dimes to the White House in what became known as the March of Dimes.
O'Connor gambled on Salk rather than Sabin.
Clinical trials
By 1953, Salk and his team had shown their experimental vaccine worked – first on monkeys in their lab, then on children who already had polio at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, and then on a small group of healthy children in Pittsburgh. One of the largest field trials in medical history soon followed.
It began on April 23, 1954. Some 650,000 children got the Salk polio vaccine or a placebo, and 1.2 million other kids received no injection but were monitored as an untreated control group.
Salk’s mentor, University of Michigan virologist Thomas Francis, independently monitored the study. After months of meticulously analyzing data, Francis revealed the results on April 12, 1955 – exactly 10 years after FDR’s death and nearly a year after the trial began.
Americans mailed dimes to the White House that funded an independent effort to combat polio.
AP Photo
A manufacturing error
When asked who owned the patent to his vaccine, Jonas Salk famously replied that it belonged to the people and that patenting it would be like “patenting the sun.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his belief that every child should receive the polio vaccine, without indicating how that would happen. Eisenhower charged Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Ovetta Culp Hobby to work out the details in coordination with Surgeon General Leonard Scheele.
Congressional Democrats advocated for a plan that would make the polio vaccine free to everyone, which Hobby rejected as a “back door to socialized medicine.”
A black market arose. Price gouging jacked up the cost of a dose of the vaccine, which was supposed to be US$2, to $20. As a result, the well-to-do got special access to a vaccine the public had funded.
The hands-off approach changed once reports surfaced that children who had received Salk’s vaccine were in the hospital, with polio symptoms. At first, Scheele, the surgeon general, reacted with skepticism. He suggested that those kids might have been infected before vaccination.
But once six vaccinated children died, inoculations halted until more information about their safety could be gathered. In all, 10 kids who were vaccinated early on died after becoming infected with polio, and some 200 experienced some degree of paralysis.
The government soon determined that the cases in which children became sick or died could be traced back to one of the six companies: Cutter Labs. It had not followed Salk’s detailed protocol to manufacture the vaccine, failing to kill the virus. As a result, children were incorrectly injected with the live virus.
Inoculation resumed in mid-June with tighter government controls and a more nervous public. In July, Hobby stepped down, citing personal reasons.
Years after the vaccine’s development, Jonas Salk would recount that sometimes he would meet people who would not even know what polio was – which he found tremendously gratifying. But the events of this past year, with all the ups and downs of coronavirus vaccine research, have proved that the history of polio’s defeat is worth remembering.
Nine companies developing a coronavirus vaccine recently joined forces to jointly promise that they would not rush anything to market until and unless the clearly delineated standards for safety and efficacy are met.
But should a modern-day Cutter incident happen again with a coronavirus vaccine, the public’s already shaky faith in vaccines could easily crumble further, impeding the effort to get as many people quickly immunized against COVID-19 as possible.
Bringing this pandemic to an end will require more than the government’s approval of one or more coronavirus vaccines that work. Coordinating a widespread vaccination campaign will also demand the navigation of logistics, economics and politics amid an equitable approach to the distribution of these new vaccines and the public’s willingness to be inoculated.
This final push will, in addition, require the often uneasy partnership among the government, the private sector and – as is true today with massive contributions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other charitable sources – philanthropy.
The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a remarkably different view of when Americans can expect a coronavirus vaccine to be ready for the general public than what President Donald Trump has been telling them.
As recently as Tuesday night Trump claimed "we’re within weeks of getting it. You know, could be three weeks, four weeks, but we think we have it."
Dr. Robert Redfield Wednesday told a Senate committee a coronavirus vaccine would not be "generally available to the American public" until "probably" the "late second quarter, third quarter 2021," meaning around late spring or the summer of next year.
He did say a coronavirus vaccine would be initially available in "very limited supply" in November or December, still farther out than what Trump has been touting. It would "have to be prioritized," Redfield added, for "first responders and those at greater risk for death."
Redfield also said there are about 80 million Americans with "significant comorbidities that put themselves at risk." It's unclear if he was blaming those people for their diseases.
Most observers believe that the president was actually referring to beating the virus by achieving herd immunity, which would require tens of millions more Americans to contract the virus so that it eventually runs out of the potential hosts that it needs to reproduce at an exponential rate.
However, a video of the president from five months ago shows that he knows pursuing herd immunity without a vaccine would put millions of lives at risk.
"If we did follow that approach, I think we'd have 2 million people dead," Trump said of herd immunity during a COVID-19 press briefing earlier this year, according to an official White House transcript. "The UK tried it — the herd approach, okay? Herd. And they tried it, and you saw what happened in UK. It set them back a lot -- a lot of time. It’s been — you know, they’re having a tough time. Other countries have tried it. And Sweden is suffering greatly. I mean, Sweden is suffering greatly."
More than a thousand nurses are known to have died worldwide due to Covid-19, the International Council of Nurses said Wednesday, adding that the true figure was likely far higher.
The ICN branded the situation "catastrophic" and lambasted governments for not doing enough to protect front-line health care workers during the new coronavirus pandemic.
The Geneva-based federation brings together more than 130 national nursing associations (NNAs), representing the more than 20 million nurses worldwide.
An ICN survey found that in countries where separate data for nurses was available, more than 1,000 had died from the respiratory disease.
"As of August 14, the cumulative number of reported Covid-19 deaths in nurses in 44 countries is 1,097," the ICN said in a report.
"As our dataset only covers 44 countries with recorded nurse deaths, ICN believes the number significantly underestimates the situation."
It said there had been 351 Covid-19-related deaths among nurses in Brazil as of August 11 -- the highest figure in the dataset -- and 212 in Mexico, according to the latest figures.
Broadening out from nurses, the human rights organization Amnesty International said on September 3 that at least 7,000 health care workers of all types had died worldwide after contracting Covid-19.
The ICN report said there was still no global systematic record of the number of nurses and other health workers who have contracted or died from the disease.
- 'Scandalous situation' -
ICN president Annette Kennedy called the report's findings "disturbing".
"Nurses and other health workers are still being exposed to Covid-19 and all its associated risks, including violence and prejudice, mental illness, infection and in what we now believe to be possibly thousands of cases, making the ultimate sacrifice by paying with their lives," she said.
"Nurses are undervalued, underpaid and sometimes treated as expendable. This is a scandalous situation which ICN urges governments to rectify."
The ICN said that in data from 32 countries, 572,478 health workers have been reported infected with Covid-19 as of August 14, accounting for, on average, 10 percent of all cases.
Only 16 out of 33 NNAs reported that Covid-19 is recognized as an occupational disease for health workers -- a classification that typically affects the right to entitlements and compensation for those who contract the disease at work.
Twenty-four out of 33 NNAs had received reports of incidents of violence or discrimination against health workers due to Covid-19 -- often because of misinformation about them spreading the virus.
Security guards escorted a man from Disney's Hollywood Studios after he refused to wear a mask.
The man urged other visitors to the Florida theme park to join him in removing their masks, which are required in most areas of the attraction, reported WDNT-TV.
“Remember the movie that came out at Walt Disney World?" the man says, as at least three guards attempt to remove him. "It was called 'A Bug’s Life!' Remember Hopper? He said, ‘If one guy stands up, one ant stands up!'"
Hopper, the 1998 film's villain, warns that if one ant stands up, they all might stand up against him and his fellow grasshoppers, but the protagonist Flik eventually realizes ants outnumber their oppressors.
“I’m not crazy!" the man shouted, according to witnesses. "I have a wife and two kids!”
The man was not apparently charged in the incident, which comes about three weeks after another man was arrested for striking a security guard at Disney's Epcot Center in a dispute over the mask mandate.
A Pennsylvania man who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 accused the candidate of "lying through his teeth" at an ABC News town hall event on Tuesday.
Paul Tubiana of Bethlehem asked Trump the first question at Tuesday's town hall.
"Mr. President, I voted for you in 2016. I'm a conservative, pro-life and diabetic," Tubiana explained to Trump. "I thought you were doing a good job with the pandemic response until about May 1. Then you took your foot off the gas pedal. Why did you throw vulnerable people like me under the bus?"
Trump responded by insisting that he has never backed off his response to the pandemic and then claimed that the government would have a vaccine "within weeks."
"He didn't answer anything," Tubiana lamented. "He was lying through his teeth."
Tubiana said that Trump gave "canned responses" at a time when people like him are "feeling scared, alone and powerless."
Another questioner, Ellesia Blaque, explained to Trump that she would die without her medications. She wanted to know why he his administration is working to overturn protections for people with preexisting conditions.
"He didn't answer my question," an angry Blaque recalled to Stelter.
Blaque said that she was "on the fence" about her 2020 vote until that moment.
"I'm going to vote for Biden," she said, noting that Trump had "reanimated me to vote."
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday asserted that President Donald Trump was using a "medical term" when he claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic would "go away" because of "herd mentality."
Trump made the remarks at an ABC News town hall event on Tuesday.
"Over a period of time, sure, with time, it goes away," Trump said, "and you'll develop, you'll develop like a herd mentality — it's going to be herd-developed, and that's going to happen. That will all happen."
In a Wednesday interview on Fox News, host Sandra Smith told McEnany that medical experts have not predicted that "herd mentality" will defeat the virus.
McEnany refused to address the president's direct quote, and instead suggested that Trump said "herd immunity."
"Well, the term herd immunity is a medical term, which means that when you have a certain percentage of the population have antibodies, you have herd immunity," the press secretary insisted. "And it can be done via a vaccine or via prior illness, you develop the antibodies."
"It's a medical term," she continued. "And what the president said very clearly there with that is that a vaccine gets you there quickest."
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — More people who are out of work and isolated at home are dying of drug overdoses in South Florida, becoming overlooked victims of the COVID-19 pandemic.Florida reported 5,621 overdose deaths, a 14% increase from January 2019 to January 2020, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And in parts of South Florida, early numbers suggest 2020 could be even worse.In Palm Beach County, overdose deaths are already 49% higher from January to August of this year than they were for the same period last year, according to records. At the current ra...
President Donald Trump says the coronavirus pandemic is "going away," and would disappear even without a COVID-19 vaccine, thanks to a "herd mentality."
That's entirely false.
"We are going to be okay, we're going to be okay and it is going away," Trump said about the coronavirus pandemic that's taken 200,000 American lives, "and it's probably going to go away now a lot faster because of the vaccine."
"It would go away without the vaccine, George, but it's going to go away a lot faster with go away without the vaccine," Trump continued, speaking at an ABC News town hall hosted by George Stephanopoulos.
An incredulous Stephanopoulos asked, "it's going to go away without the vaccine?"
"Sure, over a period of time," Trump said. "Sure with time it goes away. And you'll develop, you'll develop, like a herd-mentality it's going to be it's going to be herd-developed and that's going to happen, that will all happen, but with the vaccine, I think it will go away very quickly But I really believe we're rounding the corner, and I believe that strongly."
Trump likely meant herd immunity, which he incorrectly described. Experts say herd immunity will not resolve the coronavirus and we will be dealing with it "forever."
A group of anti-mask activists this week were caught on camera storming a Target in Florida and yelling at customers to take off their face masks.
The video shows that the anti-maskers, some of whom were wearing apparel supporting President Donald Trump, walked up and down the aisles of the Target department store and encouraging shoppers to "free" themselves of wearing face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Take off your masks!" one man yelled.
"We're not going to take it anymore!" yelled another woman.
As the anti-maskers walked by, one shopper is heard calling them "f*cking idiots."
More than 195,000 Americans so far have died from the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly seven months after the president said that he had the disease "under control" and predicted that it would "disappear" when the weather got warmer.
"'Herd immunity' without a vaccine is deadly," said one epidemiologist. "Trump's idiocy on science is killing us."
Insisting during a town hall Tuesday night that Covid-19 will simply disappear on its own—echoing a baseless claim he also made in February, March, April, May, June, July, and August—President Donald Trump touted a so-called "herd immunity" approach to the pandemic that public health experts warn would lead to hundreds of millions of new coronavirus infections and millions of additional deaths.
"Covid-19 is not going to just 'disappear.' Making that the strategy leads to more preventable deaths."
—Rep. Don Beyer
"We're gonna be OK. And it is going away," Trump told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "And it's probably gonna go away now a lot faster with the vaccine. It would go away without the vaccine, George."
When Stephanopoulos replied that "many deaths" would result such a scenario, Trump said: "You'll develop like a herd mentality. It's gonna be herd developed, and that's gonna happen. That will all happen. But with a vaccine, I think it will go away very quickly. But I really believe we're rounding the corner, and I believe that strongly."
Watch:
Trump's remarks came as Covid-19 continues to spread across the United States, with the nation averaging around 38,000 new cases per day over the past week. In total, the U.S. has recorded over 6.6 million positive coronavirus cases and at least 195,600 deaths, and it remains unclear when a safe and effective vaccine will be available to the public.
"This was not true when Trump said it in February," said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) in response to the president's claim that the virus is going away. "It is not true today, 195,000 American deaths later. Covid-19 is not going to just 'disappear.' Making that the strategy leads to more preventable deaths."
To reach "herd immunity" to the virus, experts say around 65% of the U.S. population—over 200 million people—would have to be infected. Given the current U.S. death rate from Covid-19, that number of cases would kill millions of people.
"'Herd mentality' is what his cult followers have," epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding tweeted following the president's comments late Tuesday. "'Herd immunity' without a vaccine is deadly. Trump's idiocy on science is killing us."
University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers noted that "developing herd immunity doesn't just take time, it works by infecting over a hundred million and killing hundreds of thousands."
"He's describing a massacre," tweeted Wolfers. "If you think the problem here is that he said herd mentality rather than herd immunity, you're missing the big picture. Whatever word he spoke, the idea is to sacrifice several hundred thousand more people's lives."
Trump's town hall came days after Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned the number of deaths that would result from a "herd immunity" approach to the virus would be "totally unacceptable."
"If everyone contracted it, even with the relatively high percentage of people without symptoms... a lot of people are going to die," said Fauci, who Trump officials have attempted to muzzle as he continues to publicly warn that the fight against the pandemic is far from over, contradicting the president's false optimism.
"If you look at the United States of America with our epidemic of obesity as it were, with the number of people with hypertension, with the number of people with diabetes," Fauci continued, "if everyone got infected, the death toll would be enormous."
