The Path to Recovery: How to Re-Open America

We will see...... he is assuming large numbers of people get vaccinated.

Pfizer CEO predicts 'normal life' within a year
https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/573986-pfizer-ceo-predicts-normal-life-within-a-year

Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla said on Sunday he anticipates a return to normal life post-pandemic within the year.

"I agree that, within a year, I think will we able to come back to normal life," Bourla said on ABC's "This Week."

https://twitter.com/x/status/1442135576111636485

Bourla added that he does not think that this means variants will no longer exist or that vaccines would be unnecessary.

Bourla said that the "most likely scenario" was that the world would continue to see new variants and have vaccines that would last "at least a year."

"I think the most likely scenario is annual revaccination, but we don't know really. We need to wait and see the data," Bourla said.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel echoed a similar sentiment to the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung last week saying "enough doses should be available by the middle of next year so that everyone on this earth can be vaccinated.”

These remarks from leaders of the drug companies follow the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) decision to move forward with recommending third-dose COVID-19 booster shots of Pfizer’s vaccine for people 65 and older as well as people with compromised immune systems.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said last week that boosters would also be available to people in high-risk work environments such as healthcare workers.

Walensky also reiterated the notion of annual booster shots of the COVID-19 vaccine was uncertain.
 
Beating COVID will require a 5-part strategy—including mandatory boosters and a drug we don’t have yet
https://fortune.com/2021/11/22/how-will-covid-end-mandatory-vaccine-booster-masks-drug-research/

The Delta variant has laid bare the dangers of a vaccine-only approach to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. And the worst is yet to come.

Israel and several countries in Europe—some with greater vaccination coverage than the U.S.—are experiencing the highest levels of new infections since the beginning of the pandemic. Hospitalizations and deaths, including among vaccinated and younger persons, are creeping up. Lockdowns are being reimposed. Throughout COVID-19, the U.S. has trailed behind those countries by about a month. Thanksgiving gatherings might accelerate that timeline by a few weeks.

The increase in infections, hospitalizations and deaths could be attributed to waning immunity in vaccinated and previously infected persons, and to Delta and Delta-plus variants.

Urgently increasing vaccine access, acceptance, and production, including in lower-income countries, with boosters for all, is essential to limit the coming tide of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. The Biden-Harris administration has been a global leader, but much more needs to be done. Worldwide, only 43% of the population has been fully vaccinated. In Africa—home to 1.3 billion people—the coverage rate is less than 10%.

However, a vaccine-only strategy is doomed to fail. Delta reproduces so rapidly that by the time an infected person’s immune system kicks in, the virus could have already spread to others. That fact, combined with the slow rollout of vaccines, is a recipe for disaster. Like all viruses, every time SARS-CoV-2 reproduces, it mutates. If a mutation occurs that evades the protective effect of vaccines, it is more likely to thrive in a vaccinated person. With Delta, the virus freely ping-pongs between vaccinated and unvaccinated people across the globe, significantly increasing the odds that it will “escape” the effectiveness of vaccines.

In other words, as another wave hits in the coming weeks and months, there is a high probability that variants will emerge that are resistant to current vaccines.

New vaccines to counter variants can be produced relatively quickly. But they must be produced, distributed, and received. As the current state of global vaccine coverage demonstrates, that is the public health equivalent of chasing your tail.

An easy-to-use treatment that is effective against all current and potential variants and that also significantly reduces transmission, is desperately needed. Recent reports of two drugs that decreased hospitalization and deaths in persons who are at high risk by 50% and 89%, respectively, is a significant advance. However, those drugs require twice-daily pills for five days. And because the products work through the bloodstream, they are as unlikely as vaccines to stop infected people from spreading the virus.

To get back to business as usual, we need a combined approach. First, vaccine boosters every six months should be required for return to work, and for contact in any crowded setting including public transportation—in no small part because that is how many people get to work.

Second, distancing, masking and other public health measures should be enforced in the workplace and other social settings.

Third, where possible, workplace and other settings should be arranged to limit the duration persons are in the direct airflow of others. Infection risk is largely determined by the amount of virus and the duration of exposure, which can be affected by airflow. Masks, distance and exposure could be an effective way to prevent spread of the virus.

Fourth, during surges, interval testing in the workplace, schools and other social settings, with rapid referral and access to existing treatments, should help reduce illness, hospitalization, and death.

Finally, an urgent effort is needed to develop, produce, and distribute novel, easy to use therapies that are effective against all variants, likely administered by inhalation, with triple benefits: limiting hospitalizations and deaths and the spread of infection; and providing protection from infection for six months or more. That last piece is important. If inhaled therapies could prevent infection with any variant for as long as vaccines, we could potentially advance from controlling the pandemic to ending it. We and others are working on products that could achieve those objectives.

The National Institutes of Health recently launched the Antivirals for Pandemics Program to accelerate the development of novel treatments for COVID-19 and other viruses that could cause another global catastrophe. But more is required. The Biden administration should urgently expand Project Warp Speed and lead a global initiative to develop and ensure global access to triple-threat treatments. Of course, global availability of easy-to-use diagnostic tests must be simultaneously advanced.

Cherry-picking interventions will not work: Now is the time for a kitchen-sink strategy. If we act now, we have a shot at a rough but business-as-usual-adjacent ride through cycles of surges and new vaccine resistant variants through the next two to three years. If we achieve triple-threat therapies during that time, this global nightmare could finally end.

There is no time to lose.

Mark Dybul is CEO of Enochian BioSciences and professor of medicine, Georgetown University Medical Center. He is a former head of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and a former member of the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

Serhat Gümrükçü is the founder and executive director of Seraph Research Institute and co-founder and inventor of Enochian BioSciences.
 
Welcome to Covid-19’s “junior year.” It’s not pretty.
The physical and psychic consequences of the pandemic with no end are shaping up to be devastating. What are Americans to do?
https://www.vox.com/22850742/omicron-covid-junior-year-resignation-fatigue-depression

After a brief reprieve from surging cases in the fall, omicron, the newest and most transmissible Covid-19 variant yet, is tearing its way across the nation, causing a nearly 30 percent spike nationally in cases in a matter of days. As communities roll out eerily familiar safety measures, for some, it’s feeling like 2020 again: In the past few weeks, California and New York reinstated indoor mask mandates, restaurants from Philadelphia to Houston to Los Angeles are temporarily closing amid outbreaks, at-home rapid tests are sold out from coast to coast, and some universities are sending students back online.

Welcome to the pandemic’s “junior year,” to adopt the darkly comic term that went viral on Twitter this fall. It looks like 2022 is destined to be the third year in a row that’s marked by fear and confusion, positive tests and near misses — and a resounding feeling of failure.

“There is a part of me that’s like, ‘I don’t care! I don’t care at all!’” says Theo McKenna, a 31-year-old bartender and actor in New York City. “But I’m like, I do.” While McKenna is boosted, masking up, and still determined to protect themselves and others, omicron has left them wondering, “What did we do everything for, then?”

That feeling of ever-dwindling resolve and malaise has had many names over the last 21 months: grief, burnout, “languishing,” trauma. Perhaps the most popular is “pandemic fatigue,” which describes the difficulty many well-intentioned individuals have had in keeping up safety precautions over long periods.

“People are especially exhausted because so much energy is spent on ‘what ifs’ and worrying,” says David Sbarra, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona. “There’s enough to worry about about the known-knowns that worrying about all the unknowns just takes a big toll on us after a while.”

As we face the latest “wave,” many are considering what effect this cumulative sorrow has had on us.Two years of data suggest, in short, bad things. The physical and psychic consequences of the Pandemic With No End are shaping up to be devastating, with few areas of our lives left untouched.

These days, it feels as though even the most determined Americans are scrounging around for a clean mask, wondering if it’s all still worth it.

“To be honest, if anything, I feel like I fall into the mindset of: I am vaccinated, so I’m just gonna, like, do me,” Jacob, a 23-year-old based in Baltimore, recently told the Atlantic. While the vaccinated can still spread the virus and are at risk of long Covid symptoms themselves, President Biden announced they don’t necessarily need to reconsider their holiday plans — much to the chagrin of many concerned scientists. Infection now, however, seems inevitable. Even public health experts are “mentally bracing to test positive after spending two years dodging the virus,” Dan Diamond recently wrote in the Washington Post. People who never thought they’d get sick are now questioning whether their breakthrough cases should really require 10 days of isolation.

Perhaps a feeling of crushing defeat is to be expected, says health psychologist Alison Holman, a professor in the University of California Irvine School of Nursing. Over two years of relentless chaos, the social, political, environmental, and pandemic pressures have built on each other, grinding aspirations and optimism to dust. “It’s totally unprecedented,” Holman says. “The pandemic is the first time in my life that I’ve experienced something like this: an ongoing collective trauma with many underlying chronic stressors with punctuated acute stressors.”

While we may be done with the pandemic, Covid-19 is clearly not done with us.

When the World Health Organization first declared a global public health emergency, many people were gripped by fear of the unknown.

In the first and, to date, best-studied stage of the pandemic — lockdown — essential workers continued to care for sick patients and run grocery store check-out lines. Within weeks, roughly 35 percent of people in the US were working from home and an additional 14.7 percent were unemployed. While US public health officials tried to do their best, messaging was often hopelessly confused, with endless reversals about hand-washing, mask-wearing, and more. Researchers, unsurprisingly, found a three-fold increase in depression — from 8.5 percent before the pandemic to nearly 28 percent in late March and early April 2020 according to a survey of roughly 1,441 American adults published in the journal JAMA Network Open. Anxiety similarly spiked, with about 30 percent of Americans experiencing clinically significant symptoms in the same period.

This initial nosedive in mental health was widely anticipated, in part because of the well-established science of chronic stress. When the body is flooded with stress hormones such as cortisol, the heart beats faster and harder, muscles tense, inflammation increases. Over time, the immune system weakens and the central nervous system, which remains continually on high alert, wears down, and both physical and mental health can worsen. While there are ways to manage chronic stress, one of the most protective features is a strong social network — the very thing lockdown threatened. “We all know those people for whom it’s water off a duck’s back,” says Andrew McLean, a psychiatrist based at the University of North Dakota. “But the majority of us, we need some support.”

(More at above url)
 
screw the vaccines by now...people willing to take it took it so the rest of the GOP can get by on herman cain protocols.

Shift the money to testing resources...just spent hour and half waiting for a test
 
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