7 U.S. governors say no to vaccine passports

Governor Kristi Noem bans “vaccine passports” in South Dakota | KCRG - Austin Goss"

Apr. 21, 2021 - "In an executive order issued Tuesday evening, Governor Kristi Noem banned government entities in South Dakota from requiring 'vaccine passports'.... In the executive order, Noem bans any government entity, to include local governments, within the state from requiring vaccine passports. Noem says that requiring vaccine passports could ultimately lead to 'improper disclosure of private health information.'

"'I’m going to do everything I can to protect people from getting mandates like this out of governments,' Noem [earlier in April].... 'This kind of provision is a fundamental threat to our freedoms.'"

Read more: https://www.kcrg.com/2021/04/21/governor-kristi-noem-bans-vaccine-passports-in-south-dakota/

Ducey bans ‘vaccine passport’ use by Arizona governments | Arizona Mirror - Jerod MacDonald-Evoy:

April 19, 2021 - "Gov. Doug Ducey on Monday banned state and local governments from requiring a 'vaccine passport' to receive service or enter an area.Ducey’s executive order also applies to any business that has a government contract, and bars them from requiring any customer to provide information on their vaccination status to receive any government services they provide. The executive order does allow for hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities to ask about documentation of a visitor’s, patient’s, employee’s or resident’s vaccination status. Universities, child care centers, home schools and other schools are also exempt. The executive order does not apply to private businesses. 

"'The residents of our state should not be required by the government to share their private medical information,' said Governor Ducey in a press release about the executive order. 'While we strongly recommend all Arizonans get the COVID-19 vaccine, it’s not mandated in our state — and it never will be. Vaccination is up to each individual, not the government.'"

Read more: https://www.azmirror.com/2021/04/19/ducey-bans-vaccine-passport-use-by-arizona-governments/

Arizona Becomes Sixth State To Ban Coronavirus Vaccine Passports — See The Full List Here | Forbes - Carlie Porterfield:

Apr 19, 2021 - "Ducey['s] ... executive order ... mak[es] Arizona the sixth state to denounce the passes that allow holders to prove they’ve been vaccinated against coronavirus....

"Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, in isolation after testing positive for coronavirus, signed an executive order April 14 that will ban both the state government and businesses from requiring proof of vaccination to protect 'individual liberty and personal privacy,' though he added he still encourages constituents to receive a vaccine. It’s a sentiment he shares with Idaho Gov. Gov. Brad Little (R) who issued an order April 9 banning state government entities from requiring proof of coronavirus vaccination to receive public services, in which he noted vaccines are the 'best shot at protecting jobs and saving lives.'

"On Tuesday, April 6, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued a similar executive order to block Texas state departments and groups that use public funds from issuing vaccine passports or mandating proof of immunization to receive services. On Friday, April 2, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order with an even further reach — under the order, the state government will punish private businesses that opt to require proof of vaccination by barring them from state grants or contracts.

"In February, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill into law that bans the Utah state government from requiring or issuing vaccine passports, though private businesses remain free to mandate them for patrons if they wish. Other Republican governors have not issued executive orders regarding vaccine passports, but have indicated they do not support their use, like Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R), Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R).... 

"The White House has pledged it will not pursue a vaccine passport sponsored by the federal government.... The majority of vaccine passports in development are being spearheaded by private companies in hopes it will embolden customers to feel safe traveling and pursuing in-person entertainment again at places like sports arenas, restaurants and live music venues. So far, New York is the only state to launch its own vaccine passport."

Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/04/19/arizona-becomes-sixth-state-to-ban-coronavirus-vaccine-passports---see-the-full-list-here/

Ontario drops plan for random police stops

Ford walks back police powers, playground closures | Brockville Recorder and Times - Canadian Press: 

April 18, 2021 - "Ontario reversed course on sweeping new police powers Saturday, just one day after Premier Doug Ford announced the measures that triggered a swift and furious backlash.

"Officers will no longer have the right to stop any pedestrian or driver to ask why they’re out or request their home address, Solicitor General Sylvia Jones said in a written statement on Saturday evening. Instead, she said, police will only be able to stop people who they have reason to believe are participating in an 'organized public event or social gathering'....

"Ford tweeted that another of the measures would also be reversed. 'Ontario’s enhanced restrictions were always intended to stop large gatherings where spread can happen,' Ford said. 'Our regulations will be amended to allow playgrounds'.... In a message to The Recorder and Times, Brockville Mayor Jason Baker said the city called in a crew Saturday to close the playgrounds, and he assumed it will reassign crews on Monday to reopen them.

"Civil libertarians and pundits attacked new anti-pandemic restrictions announced Friday by Ford as misguided, saying the added police powers aimed at enforcing stay-at-home orders were overkill....

"Ahead of the reversal, large and small police forces across the province said they had no intention of exercising their newfound powers. Brockville Police Chief Scott Fraser, shortly after a conference call with provincial officials following Ford’s initial announcement Friday, said the city police force would develop a 'common sense approach' and officers clearly wouldn’t be stopping every car they see. And on Saturday, the Gananoque Police Service said it ... 'will not be doing random stops of people or vehicles'.

"Andrew Fletcher, chief of South Simcoe police, said officers would only act on complaints. Police forces from Thunder Bay to Ottawa to Toronto to London and Woodstock expressed similar positions.... 'The HRPS will NOT be randomly stopping vehicles for no reason during the pandemic or afterwards (RIDE being an exception),' Halton police Chief Steve Tanner tweeted before the province walked back the regulations.

"The closing of outdoor spaces, meanwhile, puzzled many public health experts who said the measures didn’t make sense. 'Outdoor activities are vital for mental and physical health, especially with stay-at-home orders,' Dr. Isaac Bogoch, who sits on the province’s COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Task Force, said in a tweet. 'Science is clear: Outdoor COVID transmission is extremely rare.'"

"The new restrictions, including a two-week extension to the province’s stay-at-home order until May 20, were announced amid dire warnings from government scientific advisers that the pandemic was only set to worsen. Other measures include further restrictions on outdoor gatherings and indoor religious services, while recreational facilities such as golf courses are now closed. Ontario intends to shut its borders with Quebec and Manitoba to non-essential travel effective Monday."

Read more: https://www.recorder.ca/news/ford-walks-back-police-powers-playground-closures

Human infection trials for Covid approved in UK

Covid-19 ‘Challenge Trial’ Will Purposely Reinfect Adults | Wall Street Journal - Jenny Strasburg:

April 18, 2021 - "University of Oxford scientists plan to reinfect dozens of adult volunteers with the coronavirus in the second U.K. clinical trial to study deliberate Covid-19 infection ... among people who have already recovered from the virus. Such 'human challenge' trials are controversial because they involve intentionally infecting healthy humans, and the U.K. is the only country so far conducting them with Covid-19.... The new trial is focused on probing the boundaries of human immunity and the effects of the virus on the body from the moment of reinfection.... 

"The first Covid-19 challenge study, led by Imperial College London infectious-disease researchers, started in March.... That study received a pledge of more than $45 million from the U.K. government.

"Oxford’s trial is funded by the London-based Wellcome Trust, a healthcare-focused charitable foundation. As many as 64 people aged 18 to 30 years will be quarantined in staggered phases inside Oxford University Hospitals at roughly 17-day intervals, starting as soon as next month, according to Helen McShane, an Oxford vaccinologist who is leading the trial.

"Debates about inoculating humans with live, potent viruses have gone on for centuries. In the late 1700s, British doctor Edward Jenner applied material from cowpox and smallpox lesions to children and adults and recorded the reactions. The now-famous experiments paved the way for modern vaccines.

"But in the pandemic, the U.S. and other countries have steered clear of purposely infecting healthy people with the coronavirus. Critics argue the risks aren’t justified, given the broad presence of naturally circulating virus and the success of vaccines already available. What’s more, some say newer variants of the virus make the older strain used in the U.K. challenge trials less relevant....

"Challenge-trial proponents argue there is no substitute for the precision of controlled studies. They have been used for decades to study diseases including typhoid, malaria and tuberculosis and to develop vaccines. With Covid-19, Prof. McShane told journalists in a briefing last week, 'We don’t know whether someone has not been infected because they haven’t been exposed or [because] they have protective immunity.' Controlling exposure will help with those questions, she said.

"The first phase of the Oxford-led trials will test virus dosages required for reinfection.... Phase two will chart immune response, including protection via prior infection. No vaccines will be used in either phase. Volunteers will be tracked for a year."

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-challenge-trial-will-purposely-reinfect-adults-11618786860

Is disinfectant mania finally ending?

Has the Era of Overzealous Cleaning Finally Come to an End? New York Times - Emily Anthes: 

April 8, 2021 - "When the coronavirus began to spread in the United States last spring, many experts warned of the danger posed by surfaces. Researchers reported that the virus could survive for days on plastic or stainless steel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [C.D.C.] advised that if someone touched one of these contaminated surfaces — and then touched their eyes, nose or mouth — they could become infected. Americans responded in kind, wiping down groceries, quarantining mail and clearing drugstore shelves of Clorox wipes. Facebook closed two of its offices for a 'deep cleaning.' New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority began disinfecting subway cars every night.

"But the era of 'hygiene theater' may have come to an unofficial end this week, when the C.D.C. updated its surface cleaning guidelines and noted that the risk of contracting the virus from touching a contaminated surface was less than 1 in 10,000. 'People can be affected with the virus that causes Covid-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects,' Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said at a White House briefing on Monday. 'However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of infection of transmission is actually low.'

"'Finally,' said Linsey Marr, an expert on airborne viruses at Virginia Tech. 'We’ve known this for a long time and yet people are still focusing so much on surface cleaning.' She added, 'There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten Covid-19 by touching a contaminated surface'....

"'The scientific basis for all this concern about surfaces is very slim — slim to none,' said Emanuel Goldman, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, who wrote last summer that the risk of surface transmission had been overblown. 'This is a virus you get by breathing. It’s not a virus you get by touching'....

"'The most important part of this update is that they’re clearly communicating to the public the correct, low risk from surfaces, which is not a message that has been clearly communicated for the past year,' said Joseph Allen, a building safety expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Catching the virus from surfaces ... requires many things to go wrong: a lot of fresh, infectious viral particles to be deposited on a surface, and then for a relatively large quantity of them to be quickly transferred to someone’s hand and then to their face. 'Presence on a surface does not equal risk,' Dr. Allen said.

"In most cases, cleaning with simple soap and water — in addition to hand-washing and mask-wearing — is enough to keep the odds of surface transmission low, the C.D.C.’s updated cleaning guidelines say. In most everyday scenarios and environments, people do not need to use chemical disinfectants, the agency notes.... 'Disinfection is only recommended in indoor settings — schools and homes — where there has been a suspected or confirmed case of Covid-19 within the last 24 hours,' Dr. Walensky said during the White House briefing. 'Also, in most cases, fogging, fumigation and wide-area or electrostatic spraying is not recommended as a primary method of disinfection and has several safety risks to consider'... [T]he new cleaning guidelines do not apply to health care facilities, which may require more intensive cleaning and disinfection....

"'This should be the end of deep cleaning,” Dr. Allen said, noting that the misplaced focus on surfaces has had real costs. 'It has led to closed playgrounds, it has led to taking nets off basketball courts, it has led to quarantining books in the library. It has led to entire missed school days for deep cleaning. It has led to not being able to share a pencil. So that’s all that hygiene theater, and it’s a direct result of not properly classifying surface transmission as low risk.'"

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-hygiene-cleaning-surfaces.html

Modelling the effect of lockdowns

Covid and the lockdown effect: a look at the evidence | The Spectator - Simon Wood: 

April 14, 2021 - "What forces Covid into reverse? To many, the obvious answer is lockdown.... It’s often said that all else failed. The Prime Minister said on Tuesday that lockdown, far more than vaccines, explains the fall in hospitalisations, deaths and infections. But how sure are we that only lockdown caused these falls — in the first, second and third wave? Or were other interventions, plus people’s spontaneous reactions to rising cases, enough to get R below one?...

"Let’s start with the events of last March. Imperial’s Neil Ferguson, whose modelling inspired the government’s decision to go into lockdown in March, told MPs in June that ‘had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half’. Last December, a paper called Report 41 was published by Imperial College along these lines. It said: 'Among control measures implemented, only national lockdown brought the reproduction number [the "R number"] below 1 consistently. Introduced one week earlier, it could have reduced first wave deaths from 36,700 to 15,700'....

"Ferguson’s Imperial team had developed a simple model of the spread of Covid-19 and fitted it to data on the daily deaths ... to tell them how, when and by how much the R number changed.... [T]he Imperial team’s model assumed that they knew when and how R was changing. They only needed the data to tell them by how much it changed. I repeated Imperial’s analysis, but with one important difference: the data were used to also determine when and how R changed. The Imperial model then gives a very different result. It suggests that R was already below 1 before lockdown. If that is the case then, rather than surging, new infections were already in decline.... I also used a different approach, bypassing the Imperial model altogether, to directly estimate the daily number of new fatal infections from the data on daily deaths and fatal disease duration. This direct approach also strongly suggests that infections were in substantial decline before lockdown, and that R was already below one. The graph below shows what this second approach found around the time of the first lockdown.

"The same approach can be used again at the second and third lockdowns. Before the second lockdown it was argued that the tier system was ineffective and that cases were surging. But the reconstructions suggest that fatal infections — and by implication Covid infections generally — were not surging. They were in decline having peaked earlier. The third peak is between Christmas and New Year.... It is possibly worth noting that although the estimated fatal infections were in retreat before each lockdown, the daily deaths were surging each time that a lockdown was called. The psychological pressure that this puts on the decision makers is obvious....

"This brings us back to Imperial’s Report 41.... With professor Ernst Wit of Università della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland, I repeated the Report 41 analysis as reported in a pre-print (a not yet peer-reviewed study) on medRxiv. The Report 41 assumptions around the first lockdown are even more restrictive than in Imperial’s earlier study, and we again replaced them with an approach that allows the data to tell us when and how R changed, as well as by how much. Because far more data are involved this time, the scope for our own assumptions to bias our results is lessened, but we nonetheless took an approach designed to minimise such problems.

"As we went through Report 41 we also noticed some unusual things: Imperial’s model was using key input measures that were shorter than the times given in the published papers cited as sources.

• The time Imperial used from infection to symptoms (the ‘incubation period’). It’s stated as 4.6 days, citing Lauer et al. But that study says ‘the estimated mean incubation period was 5.5 days.’ A careful subsequent analysis by McAloon et al combining several studies, including Lauer et al, gives 5.8 days.
• The time Imperial gave from symptoms to hospitalisation. Imperial give a mean of 4 days, citing Docherty et al. But that paper gives 4 days as the median time. For the model they use, the corresponding mean days from onset to hospital is 6, not 4.

These two changes subtract three days from the model time between Covid infection and hospitalisation, compared to the values given in the cited literature. This is not a small issue if so much is to be made about every day mattering. Two other points from Imperial’s Report 41 were troubling:

• The model structure forced the average time from infection to infection to be quite a bit longer than the times reported in the literature.
• The model-fitting appeared to be set up in a way that attributed unusually low weight to the actual data, relative to assumptions built into the model.

"We tried to correct each of these four issues. The resulting model and analysis are very far from perfect, but we think that the results can give a somewhat more accurate picture of what the data imply than the original. Below is the picture we got for infections, by region and in total, around the time of first lockdown. Again the results imply that infections were in retreat before lockdown was called....

"So even taking the most negative view of our work, and the most positive view of the Imperial study, it is hard to see the latter as providing robust evidence for lockdown having caused R to drop below 1. Let alone as providing a reasonable basis on which to compute the number of lives that an earlier lockdown might have saved.  Even if our study’s assumptions are no better than Imperial’s, just different (which we would dispute), we have clearly shown that the Report 41 results are too strongly dependent on the model assumptions to provide reasonable evidence for the life-saving potential of earlier lockdowns claimed in the press."

Read more: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/covid-and-the-lockdown-effect-a-look-at-the-evidence

Read study here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/biom.13462

Study debunks "UK variant" Covid fears

U.K. Coronavirus Strain Does Not Lead To More Severe Illness And Death, Study Finds | NPR:

April 13, 2021 - "People infected with the U.K. variant of the coronavirus didn't experience more severe symptoms and weren't more likely to die from this particular strain, according to a new study of hospitalized patients published Monday. The strain, called the B.1.1.7 variant [later renamed the "Alpha variant" - gd], remains more contagious than original strains of the virus however, according to the study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. 

"The U.K. strain is believed to have first emerged in England in September 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is now the most common strain in the U.S.

"Researchers for The Lancet study collected samples from patients at the University College London Hospital and the North Middlesex University Hospital between Nov. 9 to Dec 20, 2020. The samples were collected just prior to a surge in hospitalizations in England and Ireland due to the rapid spread of this particular strain of the coronavirus.

"Scientists sequenced samples from 341 patients and found 58 percent were positive for the B.1.1.7 variant. The other 42 percent were infected with a different strain, according to the study. Researchers compared the severity of symptoms between the two groups and found those with the B.1.1.7 strain were not particularly worse off than those with other virus variants.

"Patients who tested positive for the the B.1.1.7 variant also reportedly had higher 'viral loads,' or greater amounts of the virus in their bodies."

Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/04/13/986647390/u-k-coronavirus-strain-does-not-lead-to-more-severe-illness-and-death-study-find

Read study here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00170-5/fulltext

Vaccine passports are instruments of control

Vaccine Passports Prolong Lockdowns | Wall Street Journal - Martin Kulldorff & Jay Bhattacharya:

April 6, 2021 - "As tens of millions are inoculated against Covid-19, officials in places as diverse as New York state, Israel and China have introduced 'vaccine passports,' and there’s talk of making them universal. The idea is simple: Once you’ve received your shots, you get a document or phone app, which you flash to gain entry to previously locked-down venues—restaurants, theaters, sports arenas, offices, schools.

"It sounds like a way of easing coercive lockdown restrictions, but it’s the opposite. To see why, consider dining. Restaurants in most parts of the U.S. have already reopened, at limited capacity in some places. A vaccine passport would prohibit entry by potential customers who haven’t received their shots. It would restrict the freedom even of those who have: If you’re vaccinated but your spouse isn’t, forget about dining out as a couple.

"Planes and trains, which have continued to operate throughout the pandemic, would suddenly be off-limits to the unvaccinated. The only places where restrictions would be relatively eased would be those still fully locked down, such as many live-event venues and schools. Yet even there, the passport idea depends on keeping the underlying restrictions in place — giving officials an incentive to do so for much longer as leverage to overcome vaccine resistance.

"The vaccine passport should therefore be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination. Such measures can be legitimate: Many schools require immunization against common childhood illnesses, and visitors to some African countries must be vaccinated against yellow fever. But Covid vaccine passports would harm, not benefit, public health. The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. 

"Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune. The young are at low risk, and children — for whom no vaccine has been approved anyway — are at far less risk of death than from the flu. If authorities mandate vaccination of those who don’t need it, the public will start questioning vaccines in general.

"Effective public health relies on trust. The public has lost trust in officials in part because they’ve performed poorly — relying on lockdowns to disastrous effect — and in part because they’ve made clear their distrust of the public. Trust, after all, is a two-way street. Coercive vaccination policies would erode trust even further. Even well-informed people may legitimately wonder: Why are they forcing me to take this shot if it’s so good for me?

"Vaccine passports are unjust and discriminatory. Most of those endorsing the idea belong to the laptop class — privileged professionals who worked safely and comfortably at home during the epidemic. Millions of Americans did essential jobs at their usual workplaces and became immune the hard way. Now they would be forced to risk adverse reactions from a vaccine they don’t need.... 

"The widespread use of vaccines against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies and other pathogens has saved millions of lives. Vaccines are one of the most important inventions in human history — the reason that before last year many in the West had forgotten that infectious disease could pose a populationwide threat. Those pushing for coercive Covid vaccination threaten all this progress by undermining public trust in vaccines. In this sense, they are more dangerous than the small group of so-called anti-vaxxers have ever been."

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccine-passports-prolong-lockdowns-11617726629