Coronavirus Morning News Brief – June 8: Vaccines Don’t Cause Serious Side Effects in Children, DeSantis Responsible for Covid’s Outsized Toll

A dose of the original Moderna vaccine
Good morning. This is Jonathan Spira reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on the 1,184th day of the pandemic and Founders’ Day at our parent company, Accura Media Group, in observance of the birthday of the company’s two founders, which immodestly includes myself.


June 8 is also Brooklyn-Queens Day, a holiday in honor of two of the boroughs of New York City.  While the holiday has its roots in the celebration of the Sunday School Union, a powerful Protestant organization in the mid-1800s, its religious origins have long since been forgotten, and it remains a secular holiday in celebration of the two boroughs, leading to complaints that the other three do not have their own specific holiday, although I would happily support the creation of Other Boroughs Day to make them happy.


OP-ED ON THURSDAY

What Winston Churchill and Canadian Wildfires Tell Us About Our Future

As I exited my building for an afternoon walk with Snickers the Wonderdog, I noticed there was something in the air.  My eyes watered and itched, my nose felt a burning sensation and the taste in my throat was as if I had swallowed a good part of a wood burning fireplace.  The sky had a kind of apocalyptic orange color and my mind turned to my visits to cities in China where children had never seen the sun shine amidst blue skies due to the heavy levels of pollution there.
This can’t be good, I thought, as I hurried the Wonderdog about his business and rushed to return to cleaner air indoors.
It had come to this.
My thoughts immediately turned to the Great Smog of 1952.  In December of that year, a period of unusually cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, contained airborne pollutants that mostly arose from the burning of coal for heat and power to form a thick layer of smog over the city of London.  It lasted from December 5 until December 9, dispersing quickly when the weather changed.
Scientists estimate that as many as 12,000 people died from the Great Smog and another 100,000 became ill.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill was slow to take action: he insisted on continuing to burn coal to give the illusion of a solid economy and continually maintained that the smog was in fact just fog and that it would eventually lift.
The wildfires of arid western U.S. cities was no longer something to be solely observed on television (that’s that box with the dial and rabbit ears on it, for the uninitiated) by others, they had breached the green shady Northeast.
For a minute, New York’s air quality was the worst in the world, exceeding the long-time record holder, New Delhi.  New York City posted the worst ever measures for air quality since the start of record keeping there and there it remained, with the worst air quality of major U.S. cities as the sun set on the apocalyptic day.
This was climate change, I explained.
We just lived through the darkest days of a pandemic where we walked around with N95 or better face masks (well, most of us did), when we went outdoors or joined crowds.  Now we were donning the same masks to merely venture into the great outdoors.
In other news we cover today, we present a special section on the hazardous smoky haze from the Canadian wildfires .  In addition, a study found no serious side effects from coronavirus vaccines for young children
CANADIAN WILDFIRE HAZE SMOKE NEWS
New York City was the far most impacted municipality in the United States from the haze smoke.  The hazy plume from Canadian wildfires resulted in a ground stop on flights to and from New York City airports including LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International.
By afternoon, Midtown Manhattan looked like it had been transplanted to mars amidst a deep hazy orange glow.  Smoky clouds obscured the city’s famous skyline and visibility across the five boroughs.
Thousands of pedestrians donned face masks that had been put away as the worst of the pandemic had waned in order to walk the streets of the Big Apple.
The smoke prompted the cancellation of two Major League Baseball games, namely the Yankees vs. White Sox match in New York and Phillies vs. Tigers match in Philadelphia.
Governor Kathy Hochul of New York called the worsening air quality “an emergency crisis.”
Also in New York City, the haze smoke led to the cancellation of performances of “Hamilton” and “Camelot” on Broadway and “Hamlet” in the Delacorte outdoor open-air theater in Central Park.
The air quality in Philadelphia remained dangerous on Wednesday night, with the Air Quality Index, which runs on a 0 to 500 scale and measures the density of pollutants, at 429 near midnight.  This figure is considered “hazardous.”
In other parts of the country, the smoky haze  reached as far south as Alabama on Wednesday.  It caused reduced air quality in parts of the Southeast, although the figures were nowhere as hazardous as in the Midwest and the Northeast.
UNITED STATES
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bears responsibility for the pandemic’s outsized toll.  The secretary said that the people still dying of Covid are mainly “either unvaccinated or undervaccinated” and that “if you’re dying of Covid today, you didn’t take precautions” in response to a question about DeSantis’ vaccine skepticism from White House reporter Adam Cancryn at Politico’s Health Care Summit.
A new study, published this week in the journal Pediatrics found that there had been no serious side effects from coronavirus vaccines in young children.  The research was conducted by Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare firm. Researchers there reviewed records of more than 245,000 doses of Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines given mostly to children age 4 or younger between June 2022 and March 2023 to form their conclusions.
Four of California’s prisons ranked worst at handling Covid and pandemic-related care for inmates. The four – Chino, Solano, Chuckwalla, and Mule Creek – had the most red flags for potential constitutional violations between April 2020 and April 2021, the first year of the pandemic.
Finally, a new Texas law bands coronavirus mask and vaccine mandates by local governments as well as shutdowns, but some Republicans want to ban these measures by private entities as well. State Representative told reporters that private vaccine mandates are “alive and well in Texas,” adding that “the state “should be leading the fight against the COVID tyranny.”
TODAY’S STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Thursday, June 8.
As of Thursday morning, the world has recorded just under 690.1 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of less than 0.1 million from the previous day, and 6.89 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 662.5 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of under 0.1 million from the previous day.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Thursday at press time is 20,655,100, an increase of 28,000. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 20,644,862, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 37,666, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past eight months.
The United States reported 72,136 new cases in the period May 4 through May 10, a figure that is down 26% over the same period one week earlier, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The test positivity rate for the week ending May 27 was 6.79%, down from 7.96% in the prior week, according to data from the CDC Respiratory Virus Laboratory Emergency Department Network Surveillance, or RESP-LENS. By comparison, the test positive rate for influenza was 1.77% and, for RSV, that figure was 0.48%.
The death toll from Covid was 1.5% in the week ending May 27, 2023, and the trend in Covid-19 deaths is up 7.1% over the same period.
Finally, the number of hospital admissions from Covid for the week ending May 30 was 7,643, a figure that is down 8.4% over the preceding 7-day period.
Starting on March 25, 2023, the Morning News Brief began to update case data as well as death tolls on a weekly basis.  In addition, starting on May 15, 2023, the Morning News Brief has pressed pause on certain data sets as we assess the update of changes in reporting by U.S. health authorities at the CDC.
Since the start of the pandemic the United States has, as of Thursday, recorded over 107.1 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of over 1.16 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, just under 45 million, and a reported death toll of 531,886.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July 2022, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States.  Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.
Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with 40.1 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.4 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 703,291, has recorded 37.6 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are Japan, with 33.8 million cases, South Korea, with 31.8 million cases, placing it in the number seven slot, and Italy, with just under 25.9 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.6 million, and Russia, with 22.9 million.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that, as of May 11, over 270.2 million people in the United States – or 81.4% – have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Of that population, 69.5%, or 230.6 million people, have received two doses of vaccine, and the total number of doses that have been dispensed in the United States is now over 676.7 million. Breaking this down further, 92.23% of the population over the age of 18 – or 238.2 million people – has received at least a first inoculation and 79.1% of the same group – or 204.3 million people – is fully vaccinated.  In addition, 20.5% of the same population, or 53 million people, has already received an updated or bivalent booster dose of vaccine, while 23.7 million people over the age of 65, or 43.3% of that population have also received the bivalent booster.
Starting on June 13, 2022, the CDC began to update vaccine data on a weekly basis and publish the updated information on Thursdays by 8 p.m. EDT, a statement on the agency’s website said.  Starting on May 11, 2023, the CDC pressed pause on reporting new vaccine data, a hiatus it said would end on June 15 of this year.
Some 70.1% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Thursday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information.  So far, 13.41 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 122,392 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 30.1% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the start of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines.
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)