Statewide vaccination numbers only tell part of the story. Pockets of under-vaccination could keep Covid in circulation far into the future. And as you can tell by this neat map there are a LOT of these pockets across the country.
Six weeks ago, I was sitting in the Reykjavik office of
deCODE CEO Kári Stefánsson when he stopped our interview to phone the country's director of health. He wanted permission to launch a massive testing program. By the end of our interview, he had it.
Even in states with great vaccination records there are pockets of vaccine holdouts — these pockets give the virus a place to continue circulating (and mutating) but can also easily spill out of the community. This is exactly what led to a record measles outbreak in 2019.
When your country has 360,000 people, one port of entry and is home to a pioneering population genetics firm, it becomes the perfect living laboratory to study Covid-19
When you look at where these holdouts are there are definitely some patterns — more rural, less economically advantaged, more Trump voters — but vaccine hesitation is a personal, nuanced thing so one demographic detail doesn't easily explain it all.
Super interesting new story from @g0ingmad. Some people, it turns out, are super-immune to Covid. And studying those folks might help us develop better treatments and vaccines
^^ I was convinced I was super-immune to Covid forever after I kept escaping the virus after close contact with infected people. Turns out, I was definitely not super-immune! But some people are!
Naturally, things move quickly when the CEO of the country's largest biotech can ring up the health director and in an hour get the green light to launch a massive testing program. But Iceland has demonstrated that widespread testing pays off.
Science is happening at light speed right now, and the squabbles that normally happen in the peer-review process are instead playing out in the press. This Los Alamos study quickly got a TON of blowback, and I think it ultimately detracted from the point at the heart of the study
Negative coverage of vaccines on Fox, in other words, seems to lead people to report Covid vaccine side effects. It's worth noting that anti-vaxx groups encourage this tactic.