Tag Archives: COVID-19

COVID, Risk, and Organ Transplants

Posted on January 30, 2022 by | 40 comments

Shamgar Connors undergoing kidney dialysis

This is the second of three posts about COVID and kidney transplants.

James A. Bacon

In January Stafford County resident Shamgar Connors, who has undergone kidney dialysis for nearly three years, engaged in an annual consultation with the University of Virginia Health system’s organ transplant team. His conversation with Dr. Karen Warburton went like this:

Warburton: [A social worker] said you’re not interested in the COVID vaccine. It is a requirement for you to be active–

Connors: I just had COVID, so I don’t know, why would I get the vaccine?

Warburton: You may have had Delta, and that may not protect you against the Omicron variant, which is what we’re seeing now. Also, our policy is, in order to have people active on the transplant list and get a transplant, you need to be fully vaccinated. You’re on the list. You’re just not on active status right now, as we tied up all these other loose ends. In order to be activated on the list, you will need to get the vaccine. … Are you willing to do it? [silence] OK, so, you don’t want to move forward?

Connors: I’d rather die of kidney failure than get the vaccine. Continue reading →

40 Comments

Posted in Health Care, Public safety & health

Tagged , ,

No Vaccination? No Transplant.

Posted on January 29, 2022 by | 39 comments

Shamgar Connors

by James A. Bacon

You would never know it from meeting him over Zoom that Shamgar Connors is living under a veritable death sentence. He requires kidney dialysis 12 hours per day. His doctors tell him that the average life expectancy for his particular kidney disease is about five years…. and he started dialysis a year-and-a-half ago. He has been on the kidney-transplant list for about three years now, but the University of Virginia Health system has put him on “inactive” status on the grounds that he refuses to take the COVID-19 vaccine.

The lengthy dialysis treatments, Connors says, make him tired. If that’s true, one wonders what he was like before they began. During our chat, the former 8th-grade teacher came across as passionate, energetic and physically vigorous. He has gained national notoriety for his stand, conducting numerous media interviews and generating hundreds of social media responses as he rallies support for his cause. Strangers have showered him with love and support; one offered him her own kidney. Others say they hope he dies.

He has found his sense of purpose, and he shrugs off the ill wishers. “I’m going to stay as stable as I can and fight this,” he says. “I don’t want a solution just for me. God has put this cause on my shoulders. I’m going to fight for all the other people. There are people sicker than me who are desperate. … I’ll go out like a super-nova.”

Connors’ case raises profound scientific and ethical issues. Kidney transplants are hard on patients’ immunological systems, which makes them more vulnerable to infections, including COVID. Because donor kidneys are scarce, hospitals don’t want to give them to patients with lower odds of survival. UVa Health insists that transplant patients get vaccinated. Connors, who sloughed off a case of COVID over Thanksgiving, says he has acquired natural immunities. UVa says those immunities aren’t good enough. Continue reading →

39 Comments

Posted in Health Care

Tagged ,

Makary on Mandates

Posted on January 27, 2022 by | 13 comments

Marty Makary

by James A. Bacon

For insight into Governor Glenn Youngkin’s approach to managing the COVID-19 epidemic, read the latest column by Marty Makary, a research professor at the Johns Hopkins University, in The Wall Street Journal. He argues that society is paying a high cost for disparaging the immunological resistance that arises from exposure to the COVID virus. 

Some excerpts from his column:

Last week the [Centers for Disease Control] released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.

Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity — the combination of prior infection and vaccination — was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.

(The CDC study can be found here.) Continue reading →

13 Comments

Posted in Public safety & health, Uncategorized

Tagged ,

The Resistance Is Cohering. And the Media is Part of It.

Posted on January 25, 2022 by | 35 comments

by James A. Bacon

I think Donald Trump might have enjoyed a longer honeymoon with the media than Governor Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares. No, upon reflection, that’s not quite true. The media went into attack mode the day after Trump’s inauguration over the crowd-size controversy (a meaningless issue that Trump largely brought upon himself by his silly insistence that the crowd was bigger than it actually was). By contrast, the media waited three or four days to take out the knives for Youngkin and Miyares.

Hopefully, we can put at least one ginned-up media controversy to bed — the paranoid and ill-informed speculation that Miyares fired University of Virginia’s university counsel Tim Heaphy as a form of retribution for taking a leave of absence to work on the investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. There was never a shred of evidence to support the allegation and plenty of reason to believe otherwise, not the least of which was the denial of Miyares’ spokesperson at the time. Now Miyares himself has said emphatically on television (see the video clip above) that Heaphy’s involvement in the Jan. 6 investigation had “zero” role in the decision to cashier him. Got that? Zero! In case you missed it… zero! Continue reading →

35 Comments

Posted in Media

Tagged , ,

Chap Petersen to the Rescue?

Posted on January 25, 2022 by | 36 comments

Senator Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax.

by Kerry Dougherty

Don’t look now, but Virginia may have its own version of maverick U.S. Senator Joe Manchin.

I’m talking about Democratic State Sen. Chap Petersen of Fairfax County. The lone member of Virginia’s General Assembly — from either party — with the stones to stand up to former Gov. Ralph Northam’s despotic executive orders last year and challenge them in court.

Petersen, a lawyer, didn’t prevail but he fought the good fight.

It appears Petersen may not be a fan of any executive orders, including the new one by Gov. Glenn Youngkin that reverses Virginia’s statewide school mask mandate.

That doesn’t mean Petersen believes kids should be wearing masks in school much longer.

In fact, in an email Petersen warned that if Fairfax County didn’t end forced masking by Valentine’s Day he’d join with Republicans in the Senate to pass a bill that liberates our school children. Continue reading →

36 Comments

Posted in General Assembly

Tagged , ,

Report From the School Mask Mandate Battlefield

Posted on January 24, 2022 by | 16 comments

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

My grandkids have been homeschooled since they were old enough to go to school (going on 16 years or so now). Therefore, I don’t have a dog in this fight over school mask mandates. Neither do most of the commenters on this blog, I suspect.

Thus, a recent conversation with a friend who does have kids in public school (two K-5 boys) was most enlightening. I freely admit that this is one conversation and may not be representative. But this friend is smart, savvy, and observant and I trust his/her general observations.

When I mentioned that Monday would be the test of the governor’s Executive Order on school mask mandate, he sort-of rolled his eyes and lamented that policy was being based on the loudest voices. Most of the parents in our Henrico neighborhood school that her sons attended supported the mask mandate, she said. It was the few who did not that showed up at the school yelling at the principal and yelling at the teachers. Continue reading →

16 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (K-12)

Tagged ,

Suddenly, Democrats Don’t Like Executive Orders

Posted on January 24, 2022 by | 10 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

Good grief, they have no self-awareness, do they?

I’m watching hysterical Virginia Democrats lose their minds because the new Republican governor issued an executive order that actually RESTORES civil liberties to Virginians.

Yet, back when Ralph Northam was issuing one useless executive order after another, the left was silent. In fact, many of them cheered as the governor stomped all over the civil rights of Virginians.

They thought it was fine when the governor ordered every person over the age of 10 to wear masks in indoor settings.

They didn’t object when he lowered the mask requirement to five.

They didn’t care when he forbade sitting on the beach. Or when, in March 2020, he became the first governor in the nation to close schools — public and private — through the end of the school year. Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Individual Liberties

Tagged ,

Belligerence as Leadership

Posted on January 23, 2022 by | 65 comments

Image credit: MyVaccineUpdate.com

by Joe Fitzgerald

About one in 16 American adults suffer with chronic pulmonary disease. Serious health guidelines say they’re the primary ones who should not wear masks. Some of them still can, but a figure of 6% is about the maximum of adults who shouldn’t wear them.

The governor of Virginia, elected to eradicate a subject that isn’t being taught, has decided that removing masks from public schools is the hill he wants to die on.

The two possibilities are that he truly believes life-saving mask mandates in public schools threaten personal freedom, or that he wants to pick a fight early on to exhibit his strength as governor.

The latter seems more likely. And while even some people are his side of the aisle are smart enough to see what he’s doing, a lot of the people who voted for him aren’t. They elected a reality TV star as president and now a financial speculator as governor. Somehow the image of a private equity manager struck them as more John Wayne than Jacob Marley. Continue reading →

65 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Public safety & health

Tagged , ,

Mask Hysteria

Posted on January 22, 2022 by | 47 comments

by James A. Bacon

People, get a grip! Emotions over this mask business are running out of control — on both sides of the debate.

On the right: Amelia Ruffner King, a 42-year-old Luray mother, has been charged with a misdemeanor for issuing threats to the Page County School Board. “No mask mandates,” the Page Valley News reports her as saying. “My children will not come to school on Monday with a mask on, alright. That’s not happening. And I will bring every single gun loaded and ready,” King continued as she was cut off a second time by the chairman for exceeding the three-minute time limit during the citizen comment period. Then as she left the room, she added: “I’ll see ya’ll on Monday.”

That kind of rhetoric is unacceptable. In a civilized society people cannot publicly issue threats, even if the violence is only implied. (Not to mention, such rhetoric feeds the leftist narrative that the parents-rights movement is a potential terrorist threat to democracy.)

On the left: Michelle Cades, a Fairfax County mother, says her 8th-grade special-needs daughter will no longer be able to attend class if the mask mandate is lifted. Reports American University Radio: her daughter’s anxiety about COVID is so extreme that she needs extra time to navigate the halls between classes so she can avoid clusters of other students. “If suddenly lots of students were not wearing masks at all, either in the halls or in my kids’ classes,” Cades says, “I honestly don’t know how my child would tolerate going to school.” Continue reading →

47 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Public safety & health

Tagged ,

COVID Vs. the Flu

Posted on January 21, 2022 by | 8 comments

Source: Virginia Department of Health

by James A. Bacon

I have seen considerable discussion on the internet recently about the relationship between COVID-19 and influenza. One thing that seems to be widely accepted is that influenza receded — indeed it practically disappeared — as COVID-19 surged. Where the disagreement occurs is over why influenza faded and now seems to be making a comeback.

The conventional wisdom is that the masking and social-distancing measures enacted to slow the transmission of COVID-19 also acted to slow the spread of influenza. That makes intuitive sense given that the measures were designed to fight influenza epidemics in the first place and were dusted off out of desperation to “do something” about COVID-19. If the conventional wisdom is correct, we would expect to see the relaxation of masking mandates under the Youngkin administration lead to an increase in reports of Influenza Like Illnesses (ILIs) compared to the normal seasonal pattern.

An alternative theory making the rounds is that the COVID-19 and influenza viruses compete with one another. COVID-19 triggers temporary immunological responses that suppress the flu. As COVID-19 advances, the flu retreats; as COVID recedes, the flu advances. Continue reading →

8 Comments

Posted in Public safety & health, Uncategorized

Tagged ,

The Great Unmasking

Posted on January 21, 2022 by | 27 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

Excellent news for students in two Hampton Roads school districts.

On Thursday, the ever-sensible Chesapeake School Board voted 7-1 to abolish its mask mandate. Beginning Monday, students in Chesapeake can breathe free again!

The board is complying with an executive order signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Saturday, removing the former governor’s mask mandate for all Virginia students in grades K-12.

In a more stunning move, the left-leaning Virginia Beach School Board also decided more or less to comply with Youngkin’s order by a vote of 9-2.

In a weird sleight-of-hand, the board voted to allow parents to opt their children out of its mask mandate beginning on Monday. The compromise was crafted by Superintendent Aaron Spence. It allows the Beach to keep its mandate in place, while letting parents decide if their kids should wear masks for seven hours a day. Continue reading →

27 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12)

Tagged ,

Youngkin Unveils No-Mandates COVID Plan

Posted on January 20, 2022 by | 38 comments

by James A. Bacon

So, what does a COVID-19 containment strategy look like without the activist governor’s usual go-to tools of mask and vaccination mandates? Governor Glenn Youngkin has provided the answer with the COVID Action Plan he unveiled this morning.

The key elements are: (1) encourage (but don’t compel) people to get vaccinated, (2) help healthcare providers cope with the surge of hospitalizations caused by the Omicron variant, and (3) re-prioritize testing to identify the virus in K-12 students, healthcare professionals, and medically vulnerable individuals.

“Today’s announcements are designed to give Virginians the tools and resources needed to make the best decisions for their families, strengthen our hospital systems, and ensure a strong recovery as we encounter new challenges associated with the pandemic that has become part of our everyday life,” Youngkin said in a press release announcing the plan.

The initiatives follow a Day One executive order prohibiting vaccination mandates. Most of Virginia’s public universities, which had made mandates the centerpiece of their COVID-19 strategies, have announced that they will comply with the order. Battles with local school boards are still being fought over requirements to wear masks in public K-12 schools. Continue reading →

38 Comments

Posted in Public safety & health

Tagged ,

Has Omicron Peaked?

Posted on January 18, 2022 by | 39 comments

Source: Virginia Department of Health

by James A. Bacon

The news media today is chock full of stories about school boards in Northern Virginia and other blue localities defying Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order ending mask mandates. The confrontations won’t be settled until the courts rule definitively whether Virginia’s Governor or the school boards have the last word. By the time that happens, the issue may be moot. It appears that the Omicron wave of COVID-19 has peaked and, though daily infections are still extremely high, they are receding.

According to the Virginia Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard, new confirmed cases of COVID-19 hit a high of 36,928 in the week ending January 8. Last week, ending January 15, new cases fell to 27,798. The latter number may miss a few stragglers in the reporting system, but it is evident that the number of infections, after leaping to unprecedented levels in Virginia, is easing off — as was predicted by the experience in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Continue reading →

39 Comments

Posted in Public safety & health

Tagged ,

School Board Bullies

Posted on January 18, 2022 by | 29 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

You’re guilty. I’m guilty. We’re all guilty.

Admit it. At election time most of us know exactly who’s running for president, congress, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, commonwealth’s attorney, treasurer, sheriff and city council.

We study bond issues and constitutional amendments.

We know how we’re going to cast our votes before we enter the polling place.

But by the time we get to “school board” on the ballot we often suffer from ballot boredom. We either don’t vote for those offices or just shrug and cast our votes for familiar names.

Never again. Continue reading →

29 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (K-12)

Tagged ,

UVa on Third-Vaccination Mandate: Trust Us

Posted on January 14, 2022 by | 12 comments

by James A. Bacon

So, the University of Virginia bumped up its deadline for students, faculty and staff to get a COVID-19 booster shot to today, one day before Glenn Youngkin, a foe of vaccination mandates, takes office. In an interview with CBS19 News, UVa spokesman Brian Coy says Youngkin’s ascension to office was not a factor in the university’s decision making. “This is what we think is necessary to keep our community safe,” he said.

What factors did go in to the university’s decision making? That’s less clear.

“This variant does pose a unique challenge, but having everybody boosted and having everybody wearing masks we believe gives us the best opportunity to have a good semester and make this year strong,” Coy said.

Coy added that UVA will be monitoring case counts, quarantine space and hospital capacity to make any decisions, and said if UVA opts to enforce other mitigation strategies, those will be announced to the community by the end of this week. (My bold)

Ah. I see. UVa will be monitoring case counts, quarantine space and hospital capacity. By implication, UVa will not be monitoring actual hospitalizations or deaths, otherwise Coy would have mentioned them. Continue reading →

12 Comments

Posted in Education (higher ed), Public safety & health, Uncategorized

Tagged , ,