Them: Is there any other vaccine in history that required three doses in a year and yet still didn’t prevent transmission of the virus it was meant to protect against?

Me: Your childhood vaccinations would like a word with you.

Before I forget, reminder that your TDap: Tetanus-Diphtheria-Pertussis (every 10 years) are technically a repetitive vaccine series or rather boosters during adulthood. HPV is another vaccine that could fit here as well.

“Even the measles vaccine, which is incredibly effective, fails to protect about 3% of vaccinated individuals who are exposed to the virus. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine-hailed a medical miracle- was 80% to 90% effective at preventing paralysis caused by the polio virus.”

“Breakthrough cases don’t mean that the vaccines aren’t

A new thread on originalism myths:
“The Indecisions of 1789: An Originalism Cautionary Tale” documents another series of misuses of sources by originalist unitary executive theorists.
The Roberts Court relied on this myth to expand presidential power:

2/ The mythic "Decisions of 1789" is that a House majority endorsed the unitary theory of implied presidential powers.
But only 16 of 53 (30%) fit that bill.
Trying to find more votes, Prakash miscategorized many members or sources.
My paper

3/ The 1st error: Thomas Hartley.
Prakash in "A New Light on the Decision of 1789," cited by Justice Thomas, claims Hartley was part of an "enigmatic" bloc of members that *could* have favored the unitary theory.
But he clearly was not a

4/ Here is what Prakash claims about Hartley (TOP).

Compare that to the original Hartley letters that Prakash cited (bottom L to Coxe; bottom R to Yeates).
Prakash seems to assume that only presidentialism could be a "principle."
Why can't the other side have principles?

5/ Hartley was in fact a leading congressionalist rallying votes against the presidentialist theory:
In the pivotal debate June 22d, Hartley advised that persons "not fully convinced that the power of removal [was] vested by the constitution in the president” should vote “no."

This would also include:

• Tylenol and Advil
• Aspirin
• Pepto-Bismol and Tums
• Benadryl and Claritin
• Sudafed
• Ivermectin‼️

👉🏻 https://t.co/3seDr4CQ8H

@POttomeyer @RonFilipkowski

@RonFilipkowski

here’s a screenshot of what the @gop deleted and hopes you’ll forget (via https://t.co/qH1DxrwRk8)

In this thread @EricTopol describes evidence from Israel of waning anti-#SARSCoV2 immunity months after mRNA #COVID19 #vaccination.
But as I wrote https://t.co/NZk0v3r6Dc the explanation is about timing. People ARE immune, but after months response goes
MORE

2/ ..into the B cell memory compartment, and circulating neutralizing antibody levels in blood plummet. THAT IS NORMAL with vaccines. The challenge is #DeltaVariant speed of replication is 2-3Xs faster than "normal" #SARSCoV2 so it outpaces antibody production from memory.

NEW: people worry when they hear "40% of hospitalisations are fully vaxxed", but this chart shows that's actually good news.

The more people you vaccinate, the higher their share of hospitalisations, but the *total* number in hospital is a fraction of what it would otherwise be

If fewer people are fully vaccinated, a smaller share of hospitalisations will be fully-vaxxed too, but this is not a good thing:

Overall there will be a lot more people in hospital because far more of the population is unprotected.

In other words: if you want to know whether the vaccination program is working, don't focus on whether the fully vaxxed make up 40% or 12% of hospitalisations.

Focus on whether the hospitalisation rate is 270 per million or 684 per million.

And since this is Twitter, I've prepared the same thing in meme form

But back to charts:

All the data we have suggests vaccines are working remarkably well. Far beyond what had been hoped for a year ago.

For example, a fully-vaxxed 80-year-old now has the same risk of dying from Covid as an unvaxxxed 50-year-old. That's an enormous drop in risk!

9 year old child with COVID pneumonia.
Florida

@PeterSchorschFL @CDCgov @NikkiFried Just now 6 kids are in hospital with Covid in Fl pneumonia is a given, here’s what a 9 yr old with pneumonia looks like. He spent 3 days in P-ICU 6 days in all in the hospital. If you could prevent a child from going through this just by wearing masks why the hell wouldn’t you?

How much should you worry about getting COVID if you’re fully vaccinated?

A helpful graphic:

And if you’re not vaccinated?
Here’s the graph:

@Christi22657596 Salam, the unroll you asked for: THREAD: As news stories drop about COVID+ pandemic deniers &… https://t.co/I0mZD4so2m Enjoy :) 🤖

Last week I spoke to over 5000 people in rural Georgia. Most were not vaccinated because they still had questions. EVERY question they asked was legitimate and important.

Stop telling people to “just get vaccinated” if you aren’t willing to put in the work to help them do it.

That “work” is MUCH more high touch than spouting condescension online.

“The unvaccinated” are not a monolith of defectors. They are people our health care system has long underserved - Black folks, rural folks, un and un/under insured folks and young folks.

That work requires daily acts to dispel and decrease the rampant disinformation people are contending with. It requires laws that prevent media organizations from willfully distributing disinformation about science during a pandemic when peoples lives depend on vaccine science.

That work requires interventions that can successfully vaccinate groups NOT individuals - like households, schools, churches work places - so that the protection of vaccination is SHARED among those most likely to encounter each other. Remember, vaccines protect you AND others.

That work requires incentives to vaccinate that begin locally, not trickle down from above. A lot of people are not aware of the large federal programs available to them. But they know their child care provider or grocery store attendant or neighbor - THEY are the influencers.

With 90% of American seniors now fully vaccinated, the overwhelming majority of the country's mortality risk has been, simply, eliminated. Even given Delta and flatlining vaccination rates, it is already a very different pandemic now. A thread (1/x).

There will be new cases, some of them severe and some leading ultimately to death. And there of course complications beyond death—even beyond hospitalization and severe disease.

If vaccination rates got close to 100%, we might be able to bring those numbers, in the future, close to zero. But even now we have probably eliminated 90% of all potential mortality from COVID-19. This makes it a very different kind of disease than we encountered last year.

First, "they kids are safe. Believe it or not, they always have been."

"It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu."

Thinking about all of those Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who drilled for months (if not years) in preparation for January 6 while visions of “Antifa super soldiers” danced in their heads.

Anyway, watch this video and share it with everyone you know.

While I have no doubt McConnell would be delighted to block a Biden justice, I also think teasing his intent this way reignites all the expand the court pressure, which is definitely a “radical idea” the GOP wants to run against next year.

Mitch thinks getting the Dem base fired up on yet another obviously necessary move that Joe Manchin will kill is a win for his side. If protecting voting rights is impossible, I’m not sure how we get to expand the court in the next year.