Tag: vaccinated people
Don’t Wait to Get Your Kid Vaccinated
Karen Ocwieja delivered her twin sons last June, just weeks before Delta broke across the American Northeast. For months, she and her husband sheltered the boys, who’d been born premature, limiting their exposures to friends, family, and other kids, hoping to guard them from COVID’s worst. But all four of them still ended up catching the virus this January—the boys’ first bona fide illness. Then, in May, the twins tested positive again. Born with Ocwieja’s antibodies from pregnancy and
Omicron Isn’t Mild for Hospitals
When a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what’s wrong happens invisibly. At first, there’s just a lot of waiting. Emergency rooms get so full that “you’ll wait hours and hours, and you may not be able to get surgery when you need it,” Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, told me. When patients are seen, they might not get the tests they need, because technicians or necessary chemicals are in short supply.
Our First Preview of How Vaccines Will Work Against Omicron
And there it is, the first trickle of data to confirm it. In the eyes of vaccinated immune systems, Omicron looks like a big old weirdo—but also, a kind of familiar one. That’s the verdict served up by several preliminary studies and press releases out this week, describing how well antibodies, isolated from the blood of vaccinated people, recognize and sequester the new variant in a lab. The news is … well, pretty much the middling outcome that experts have
Unvaccinated Is Different From Anti-Vax
Last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that COVID-19 is “becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” President Joe Biden said much the same shortly after. They are technically correct. Even against the fast-spreading Delta variant, the vaccines remain highly effective, and people who haven’t received them are falling sick far more often than those who have. But their vulnerability to COVID-19 is the only thing that unvaccinated people universally share. They are disparate in almost every way that matters, including