The Health 202: Trump says he ‘recommends’ the coronavirus vaccines

Noting he had been vaccinated before leaving the White House, Bartiromo asked whether he would recommend others do the same.

“I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it — and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly,” Trump said. “It’s a great vaccine, it’s a safe vaccine, and it’s something that works.”

“But, you know, again, we have our freedoms, and we have to live by that, and I agree with that also,” he added.

Unlike other administration officials, Trump didn’t receive his doses publicly. Both Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Trump’s former testing czar, Brett Giroir, have called on Trump to reassure his supporters that they should get immunized.

Much has been made of vaccine hesitancy among minorities, but recent polls have found Republican voters are among the most resistant to getting the shots. Forty-seven percent of Trump’s 2020 supporters and half of Republican men overall said they wouldn’t get vaccinated, in an NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll. A CBS News poll found 33 percent of Republicans said they wouldn’t get a shot, compared with just 10 percent of Democrats.

GOP pollster Frank Luntz convened a focus group over the weekend aimed at learning what types of messages would most resonate with these voters. Participants, who were identified only by their first name and state — disliked the idea of pro-vaccine ads with politicians, including the former president, Dan Diamond reported.

The group, which heard from GOP politicians and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, said they believed the coronavirus threat is real and that they didn’t want to be condemned as “anti-vaxxers” who oppose all vaccines.

“Instead, they blamed their hesitation on factors like the unknown long-term effects of new vaccines, even though scientists have stressed their confidence in the products,” Dan writes. “They also accused politicians and government scientists of repeatedly misleading them this past year — often echoing Trump’s charges that Democrats used the virus as an election-year weapon and overhyped its dangers. Several said that recent political appeals to get the shot were only hardening their opposition.”

The former CDC director earned praise from the group when he shared “five facts” about the virus and the vaccines. 

The participants said they were underwhelmed after hearing from politicians — including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — and stressed that they wanted candor and honesty about the science behind the vaccines. 

“It was political stunts like that that leave doubt in our minds,” said a man identified as David from Texas.

Biden, who has said he doesn’t need Trump to reach the vaccine-hesitant, deployed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins to join clergy at Washington National Cathedral last night as they were vaccinated on camera. Collins, a devout Christian who is beloved by many evangelicals, is an “apt ambassador to bring Biden’s health message to communities of faith,” my colleague Olivier Knox wrote.

Biden has also stressed the importance of local officials in persuading people to get vaccinated.

“The thing that has more impact than anything Trump would say to the MAGA folks is what the local doctor, what the local preachers, what the local people in the community say,” the president told reporters.

Biden said this in an interview yesterday, per the AP’s Zeke Miller:

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this, when asked about GOP outreach efforts: “We know we need to meet everyone where they are, and that includes conservatives and ensure there are trusted messengers who lead the way in those engagements.”

Some people who have been grappling for months with recurring fatigue, racing heart rates, brain fog and other symptoms have found themselves feeling remarkably better after receiving the vaccine. The reports are puzzling clinicians and researchers, who have yet to even come to a consensus on a definition for long-haul covid-19 or an estimate of how many people it has affected.

“The only thing that we can safely assume is that an unknown proportion of people who acquire SARS-CoV-2 have long-term symptoms,” Steven Deeks, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California at San Francisco, told The Post. “We know the questions. We have no answers. Hard stop.”

The Post’s Lenny Bernstein and Ben Guarino list some of those questions: “If long-haulers are suffering from immune systems that went awry and never reset, why would vaccines — which rev up the immune system — help some of them? Are reservoirs of coronavirus hiding in the body? Are some long-haulers experiencing a placebo effect from the vaccine? Or does the disease simply take longer to run its course in some people?”

Research on the impact of vaccinations on people suffering from long-term symptoms has only started to emerge. If it turns out that vaccinations do relieve symptoms for some long-haul patients, there could be several explanations. It could be that an immune response wipes out any remaining viral reservoirs or that the vaccine changes the body’s autoimmune response.

Caseloads are down nationally from a winter peak in early January. There are about 41,000 people hospitalized in the United States with covid-19 now, compared with more than 130,000 in early January. Tens of millions of people have been fully vaccinated and 2 million more each day are administered a dose, Joel Achenbach, Ariana Eunjung Cha and Jacqueline Dupree report.

But with 55,000 new infections daily, the virus still poses a formidable threat. Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland and New Jersey are all seeing an uptick in their numbers. New York City is no longer seeing a decline in cases despite intensive vaccination efforts.

Expert warnings are colliding against the realities of a pandemic-weary nation. Wedding parties are kicking off in New York, Pennsylvania is allowing more fans into stadiums, and most of Maryland has opened restaurants to full capacity, our colleagues write.

“It’s like we’re in the home stretch where it hurts more than any other time,” Mary Jo Trepka, an epidemiologist at Florida International University, told The Post, comparing the situation to the tail end of 800-meter race. “But if you give up now, you’ve given up the entire race.”

“We believe countries should work together to save lives,” the tweet read. “Efforts to undermine the vaccines are unethical and are costing lives.”

The Health Attaché office within HHS’s Office of Global Affairs pushed Brazil to turn down offers of Russian vaccines last year, according to the report. While the Russian vaccine faced initial skepticism, it has now been approved in more than a dozen countries, although not yet in Brazil. A recent peer-reviewed study in the British medical journal Lancet found the vaccine’s efficacy on par with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

Brazil has the second-highest death toll from the virus worldwide and has struggled to obtain vaccine supply. So far, only 2.3 percent of its population has been fully vaccinated with shots from AstraZeneca or Sinovac.

The case is another example of the ways in which vaccines have become a form of diplomatic currency. China, which has been promoting its own coronavirus shots, recently announced that foreigners who received one of several Chinese vaccines will receive streamlined entry into the country.

The United States has been less visible in the vaccine soft-power game so far, but that may soon change. Biden said that his administration is in talks with several countries about how it will share extra vaccine doses. 

• The Food and Drug Administration will make it easier for companies to market at-home coronavirus tests. The agency has released a new policy allowing companies to market their tests without first studying their efficacy in people without symptoms. The new rules stem from recognition that repeated testing over time for screening purposes can make test results more accurate and can help facilitate the return of Americans to school and work, Politico’s David Lim reports. 
   
• Moderna has started testing its vaccine in babies and young children. The company plans to enroll 6,750 children between the ages of 6 months to 11 years in the United States and Canada as part of a trial to test the safety and efficacy of its vaccine.

• Growing evidence suggests that variants of the coronavirus evolved inside people with weakened immune systems. In most people, an active coronavirus infection lasts a week, but it can last for months in people who are immunocompromised, potentially allowing many opportunities for the virus to pick up new mutations, the New York Times’s Apoorva Mandavilli reports.
   
• Coronavirus has proven especially deadly to young Latinos. In California, state figures show that Latino people died of the virus at more than 5½ times the rate of White people the same age. The higher mortality rates from the virus has caused Latinos’ life expectancy to plummet by about three years during the pandemic, The Post’s Akilah Johnson reports. “The findings proved all the more stunning because for years researchers had recognized that Latinos in the United States lived longer than White people, despite social, political, economic and environmental factors that typically erode health and shorten lives,” she writes.

More than 100 representatives are co-sponsoring a Medicare-for-all bill. Advocates say that the pandemic has served as a wake-up call to the limits of employer-sponsored health care amid widespread job losses, The Post’s Dan Diamond reports.

“Everybody is seeing the chaos and the destruction that the pandemic has caused,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of the bill’s lead authors. “And it’s really making people look and [ask], could we have had something different had we had a Medicare-for-all system in place?”

But advocates face a steep battle in a narrowly divided Congress, and Biden has consistently said he doesn’t support a single-payer system.

Medicare-for-all champions say that if they can build enough momentum in Congress, Biden won’t be able to ignore it. Jayapal and co-lead author Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) will hold a kickoff event today with colleagues, unions and progressive groups. And a spokesperson for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said that he intends to introduce a Medicare-for-all bill in the Senate.