"Cosmetology is one of the most popular vocational tracks in Mass., but is it too late for a makeover of Madison Park’s beauty program?" by Meghan E. Irons Globe Staff, February 27, 2021=
The years have eroded the onetime grandeur of the beauty salon at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School. Inside the cavernous space, the dusty floor is buckling, the brown wash sinks look battered, and the aging furniture aches for replacement.
Even before the pandemic, the salon chairs were mostly empty. Few outsiders came there to get their hair and nails done for a nominal fee by the Roxbury school’s students who were mastering their craft. Not many educators and administrators from the Boston Public Schools headquarters around the corner, or the personnel at the police headquarters on nearby Tremont Street, or even nearby residents looking to freshen up.
“Nobody trusted us,” said Klary Ruiz, a 2014 graduate who was in the school’s cosmetology program, or perhaps they didn’t know the students were there, waiting, and they can be excused for that oversight, because the cosmetology program has long been an afterthought at Madison Park just as Madison Park has long been an afterthought in the Boston Public Schools. In many ways, in fact, the program is emblematic of the school itself and its longstanding struggles, including lagging attendance, missed internship opportunities, revolving door leadership, and, critics say, the serial failure to prepare students on the vocational track for a living wage post graduation.
The victims, of course, are the students, and their dreams.
“I think it’s unfair to kids to send them into tracks that destine them to low-wage jobs,” said James Rooney, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, which has recommended auditing all of Madison’s programs, including cosmetology.
Most years, the program’s graduation numbers are mired in the single digits. The majority of its students lack the grades or attendance record to qualify for internships, called co-ops, at local salons, and of the 34 students who graduated from Madison’s cosmetology program between 2016 and 2020, only seven took the state licensing test to operate as a cosmetologist, specializing in hair, nail, and skin care, figures from the school show. (Only five passed.)
With all due respect, the program to encourage minority women to become hairdressers is insulting and an obvious failure.
So what is the le$$on to be learned?
Madison’s executive director Kevin McCaskill acknowledged that the cosmetology program could be strengthened, but said that it plays an integral role in keeping scores of students — most of them Black and Latino young women — engaged in school, and at least when it comes to attendance and graduation, there are faint signs of progress overall at Madison. The graduation rate is up from 59 percent in 2015 to 69 percent last year. (Districtwide, the graduation rate is 83.6 percent.)
“We are in the business of providing something that students are passionate about . . . especially for students of color,” said McCaskill.
“How many times do [they] get opportunities to pursue things within our urban schools that [they] are really passionate about?”
What if they were passionate about investigating 9/11?
Madison, with more than 1,000 students overall, offers 20 vocational programs in everything from electrical, culinary arts, automotive technology, and hospitality management to facilities management.
Some are progressing acceptably; some, like cosmetology, are floundering and in need of reinvention.
The work of reaching the long unmet goal of upgrading cosmetology and other less successful vocational tracks has been hampered by the school’s chronic changes in leadership. The school, which currently does not have a permanent headmaster, has churned through six since 2012.
Teachers have been “scared to implement something new because they feared a new leader would come in and say, ‘This is what we are doing now,’” said one current administrator who did not want to be named.
Without some leadership stability, many agree, it will be difficult for the school to overhaul its most moribund offerings.
Statewide more than 1,500 students have been enrolled in a high school cosmetology program each of the past three school years, making it one of the most popular vocational tracks across Massachusetts. Madison’s program currently enrolls more than 40 students between the 10th and 12th grades.
The salon, once bustling with clients in the 1980s, has seen business fizzle through the years. For now, it sits empty while students learn on their mannequins from Zoom classes at home. School officials said the pandemic has offered one silver lining, allowing them to introduce students to more industry experts, who provide live virtual hairstyling demonstrations and offer career advice.
Critiques of the program stretch back several years. In 2016, the School Department launched an internal review of the different tracks at Madison Park to assess whether they led to viable career paths in the city.
Makeeba McCreary, the superintendent’s chief of staff at the time, and Turahn Dorsey, then the city’s education chief, led the effort. The examination gave high marks to six tracks, including culinary arts, carpentry, and automotive technology; the examiners recommended a redesign for eight others, including automotive collision and Internet support services, and they advised scrapping four programs, including cosmetology, which the report said only prepared students for low-wage jobs with few opportunities for career advancement.
“NOT a viable field,” read the report, which urged giving students more hands-on experience or incorporating more training in management — if the school kept cosmetology alive, yet nothing seemed to come of the effort.
By the time the report came out, the state had stepped in, declaring Madison Park underperforming and putting in place a turnaround plan that focused on boosting the academic instruction and improving graduation rates, but that renewed focus on core academics too often meant the school’s vocational offerings took a back seat in planning and prioritization, Dorsey said.
Three years later, in 2019, a Chamber of Commerce report urged Madison’s leaders to reinvent several of the school’s tracks, including marketing and broadcasting. It also applauded the school for other programs with job potential, including criminal justice and advanced manufacturing, and encouraged adding robotics and a program for veterinary assistants.
The chamber urged Madison to conduct an audit to assess whether its vocational programs, including cosmetology, were aligned with the needs of the labor market. In the summer of 2019, Madison’s headmaster established a committee to shore up the business and entrepreneurship component of cosmetology and other programs, but by the following spring, she was removed as part of a district shakeup.
The district expects to have a new leader in place by September — after aborting, and then restarting, a national search. In the meantime, McCaskill is leading the school. The committee the school established remains in place, and is proceeding slowly, he said. The audit has not been done.
Some current and former Madison leaders say external critiques may not fully capture cosmetology’s value at the school. In addition to keeping many students connected to Madison, cosmetology allows graduates to use their training to style hair and earn cash to help put them through college or supplement other income, McCaskill said.
“If you take away our [program], you’re taking away a lot of reasons that girls would come to the school,” said Elizabeth Russell-McCormick, an instructor in the cosmetology program.
The school serves a largely high-needs, economically disadvantaged student body; for many years Madison was the high school where many of the most challenging students ended up.
Until she became coordinator of Madison’s co-op program in 2019, LaTrelle Pinkney-Chase, a salon owner and mother figure to countless Madison cosmetology students, was one of the two instructors in the program. She said students received experience in such skills as curling hair, coloring hair, and nail care. Students “truly do learn all types of hair,” she said. “That doesn’t happen everywhere.”
The challenges, including poor attendance and lack of intern experiences, exist across the district and are not specific to Madison or the cosmetology program, Pinkney-Chase and others said.
“It’s schoolwide, and it’s districtwide,’' she said.
Students and graduates have mixed perspectives.
Ruiz, the 2014 graduate, craved more hands-on experience like the rare occasions that outsiders visited the salon. But most of the time, students worked on mannequins. “All the cosmetology program [entailed] was basically just working on dolls,” she said.
“It would have been better if we had an internship, even if it was unpaid.’'
As a result, Ruiz said, she never completed the 1,000 hours of school training required to take the state licensing exam.
She said students are sensitive to Madison’s leadership instability and the toll it has taken, particularly after former headmaster Charles McAfee was driven out in 2012. The lack of direction at the top manifested itself in general disorderliness and a lack of motivation at all levels. Ruiz said she started to come to school late and had trouble focusing, but Nashaly Puente, a 21-year-old Dorchester resident who graduated from Madison in 2018, said she learned a lot from from the teachers as well as from trips to attend hair shows in Atlanta and New York. She also had plenty of exposure through her Madison coursework to the business side of running a salon. (The school has had a partnership with the Department of Mental Health, serving some of its clients at the salon.)
“If you decided not to move on with your career after high school,’' Puente said, “then that’s on you, because we had really good teachers.”
Nearly everyone agrees that more hands-on experience through the school’s decade-old co-op program would help strengthen Madison’s cosmetology program.
“It’s frustrating when I have to look at a great kid — and 90 percent are great kids — and tell them that because of your attendance and tardiness, I can’t recommend you into a co-op,’' said Pinkney-Chase.
A new report from the Pioneer Institute, a public policy think tank, found that overall Madison lags badly behind other vocational schools in internship placement. In 2019, just 29 of the 358 juniors and seniors in a vocational program at Madison Park had co-op jobs; that’s fewer than one in 10.
That year, the 25 regional technical vocational schools that reported their co-op figures had an average placement rate of 28 percent, with the range extending from 13.3 percent to 53.6 percent, according to the Pioneer report. Madison’s rocky performance stands out, and the consequences for students are very real.
“Madison Park has a key role to play in growing the Greater Boston economy,” said Jim Stergios, Pioneer’s executive director, “but to reach that potential and, importantly, to create a bridge for low-income students to enter the middle class, the school must succeed in connecting its students to area employers.”
Between 2013 and 2018, only one Madison cosmetology student had a co-op placement. Since then, five students have had co-ops at three different salons, according to school data.
School leaders fault poor attendance and academics for the low co-op placement rate. To qualify, the state requires students to complete the 1,000 hours working on clients at school. They also must have a school attendance rate of over 90 percent and a B average in the discipline in which they seek a placement.
The low rates of co-op participation translate into low rates of students taking the state licensing exam to become a hairstylist. Between 2017 and 2020, 113 students from Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg passed the test compared to Madison’s six.
McCaskill, who has been at the school for six years, said school leaders are trying to add more co-op partnerships and expand the Possible Project, an after-school program focused on entrepreneurship.
Rhode Island provides one model of how Madison Park could revive its cosmetology program, and with it other vocational tracks.
As in Massachusetts, state business leaders there had complained for years that vocational students were graduating ill-prepared for high-skill jobs. The state invested $5 million in a reboot of vocational programs, reasoning it would no longer support those that “had no value” to students or employers.
Now, students interested in cosmetology must also complete a business and entrepreneurship track, where they learn about business planning and budgeting.
“We didn’t want to get rid of [cosmetology],” said Steve Osborn, who oversees career, technical, and education programming for the Rhode Island Department of Education. “We want to be confident with the skills that our program graduates were [leaving] with.”
Dorsey, Boston’s former education chief, praised Rhode Island’s approach as smart because “it doesn’t take student choice away.”
Clearly cosmetology and other fields are popular courses of study, but, he added, it’s important to design them in ways that maximize students’ potential for success.
“It’s time to reimagine [Madison],’' he said.
So are you excited about your first day of school on Monday?
"Two tales of one city: The Port sits in the shadow of Moderna and Pfizer" by Hanna Krueger Globe Staff, February 27, 2021
Nov. 17, 2020, was a momentous day in Kendall Square. Moderna — a little-known Cambridge biotech built on the long-unrealized dream of using the technique of mRNA insertion to create new drugs — announced that its coronavirus vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, joining its biotech behemoth neighbors Pfizer and BioNTech in the global race to end the pandemic. The triumph reaffirmed Kendall Square’s enviable reputation as a hive of innovation and opportunity.
That same day, just one block away from Moderna’s headquarters, 83-year-old Wilma Allston-Hughes arose in the neighborhood she had lived in for over six decades. For much of that time, The Port, long known by its planning designation, Area Four, was considered among the least desirable spots to live in Cambridge. Now, gleaming office buildings and state-of-the-art labs have sprung up in all the vacant lots east of the neighborhood, making the maze of brick three-story walk-ups where Allston-Hughes lived an island within a sea of silver and glass.
She had moved there with her foster mother as a teenage polio survivor, becoming a matriarch in the mostly Black and brown community over the years, but on Nov. 17, Allston-Hughes lost her footing and fractured her rib. Tests at Mass. General revealed she was also infected with the coronavirus. She stayed in the hospital another month, in and out of intensive care, until she died on Christmas Day.
That was the first full paragraph on the page A8 turn in, but the worst is yet to come.
The two events unfolded within 2,000 feet of one another but worlds apart. The Port neighborhood, home to Washington Elms and Newtowne Court, two of the oldest public housing developments in the country, has long existed in the shadow of its thriving high-tech neighbors.
“It’s the tale of two cities. People look at Cambridge and they see Harvard and MIT, Moderna and Pfizer, but they don’t see the other side,” said 26-year-old Niko Emack, a lifelong resident of The Port.
The gulf between the two communities has perhaps never been wider than at the start of 2021 when the quest to defeat COVID-19 with vaccines went into high gear. The biotech firms develop groundbreaking technologies to manipulate nucleic acids in human cells, while Newtowne Court residents struggle to access basic broadband. Families living in Washington Elms report an average annual income of $29,833, while some Kendall Square CEOs rake in seven-figure salaries. Moderna board members received their first jabs in late December, but it wasn’t until February that a public vaccination clinic appeared in Cambridge, four miles away from The Port, and whenever the vaccine is made available to them, many Port residents said they likely won’t accept it, skeptical about safety even though the vaccine formula was concocted in their backyard.
That paragraph is enough to make one $ick since it is the Globe who has advanced such policies even while they ostensibly decry them in their paper. They then add insult to injury with the jab regarding their ungratefulness regarding the $hot.
For a long time, The Port sat on the literal wrong side of the train tracks in Cambridge, occupying a 191-acre plot extending west from Kendall Square to Prospect Street in Central Square, but in the past decade, with nearly every square foot of Kendall Square occupied, companies like Pfizer and Moderna have edged closer. The neighborhood — a melting pot of lower-income immigrant communities since the 1940s — found itself surrounded by the sounds of jackhammers. The housing developments remained but beloved barbershops and corner stores were reborn as coffee shops and microbreweries catering to the newer arrivals.
“I have a love-hate relationship with it all, because on one hand, growth is important,” said Ty Bellitti, who grew up in The Port but moved away because he couldn’t afford to purchase a home in the neighborhood, “but it sucks when the people aren’t empowered to grow with it.”
Up until a few years ago, the city of Cambridge still called the neighborhood Area Four, a name designated by the Planning Board in 1953 and irksome to residents who argued it sounded like a police sector. Ultimately, 85 percent of neighborhood residents favored a switch to “The Port.”
The neighborhood is one of 13 in the small city that consistently ranks as one of the three most expensive in the country. In January 2020, the average rental cost in Cambridge was $3,189 a month. Tenants of Newtowne Court and Washington Elms are required to put 30 percent of their income toward rent, which equates to roughly $750 a month for most families.
Many tenants make their living working at places like CVS, Target, Whole Foods, and Shaw’s. Of the 342 adults in Washington Elms and Newtowne Court who listed their employer on housing documents, just one reported working at one of the city’s 10 largest biotech employers, according to data provided by the Cambridge Housing Authority.
Some tech giants have extended support to the neighborhood. Google donated a computer lab to the Margaret Fuller House, a social services provider, in 2019, and BioMed Realty made a $2 million donation to the house last December, the largest in the organization’s history. Biogen, Novartis, and Sanofi have also been reliable partners with neighborhood groups over the years, but many community advocates see the efforts as fleeting and superficial. MIT and Google collaborated to create free high-speed Internet that services Kendall Square, but the early 20th-century brick walls of Washington Elms and Newtowne Court block residents from accessing the wireless network, unless “they hang their computer out the window or stand in the middle of the street,” said Mike Johnston, executive director of the Cambridge Housing Authority.
Several companies commissioned artists from the Cambridge Community Art Center to paint a mural celebrating Port institutions like the Margaret Fuller House and Izzy’s, a storied Puerto Rican joint across the way from Washington Elms, but the painting is hardly a conspicuous neighborhood presence, located as it is in a rear alleyway of the office park, along the wall of a Cambridge Athletic Club that requires a $74 monthly membership fee (but offers discounts to employees of nearby biotechs).
A spokesman for Pfizer said the company has provided financial support to eight community organizations in the past year and recently partnered with MassBio on a social media campaign to further vaccine knowledge and trust within communities of color. A spokesman for Moderna did not provide comment on outreach efforts to The Port community.
Wall Street analysts project the two companies will generate over $32 billion in COVID-19 vaccine revenue in 2021 alone.
Who would want that to dry up, 'eh?
That is why is is called a $camdemic amongst the sentients.
“Look, people are dying. This is an opportunity to look at a crisis of great proportions in what is deemed a science mecca and wonder why the wealth and resources of that mecca aren’t touching the residents of the neighborhood it exists in,” said Tony Clark, chair of My Brother’s Keeper Cambridge, a nonprofit focused on empowering vulnerable youths in the city.
The exact toll of the pandemic on Cambridge’s most vulnerable residents is not officially known. Johnston oversees the housing authority, which functions separately from the city of Cambridge. He has asked the Public Health Department repeatedly to release data on how many of his residents have tested positive or died from the virus, but the department has denied the request, citing privacy issues.
Anecdotally, residents report losing a number of Port residents to the virus. Clark said two of his aunts, both longtime neighborhood residents, died from COVID-19 last year. Wilma Allston-Hughes often outfitted herself with multiple masks and a face shield, but, ever the advocate, she worked the election polls two days before her 83rd birthday. She was admitted to the hospital 12 days later.
I don't mean to be insensitive, but any co-morbidities or is this all "anecdotal?"
Beyond that, since CV has been proven to not exist and is simply seasonal cold and flu with a fancy name, what is the purpose of this and did it even really happen the way the pre$$ says?
That's no longer an out-of-left-field question, sorry. Their endless agenda-pushing distortions and lies make it a legitimate question regarding all articles.
The pandemic has also wrung from the neighborhood the cultural bastions that remain. Port Cafe, a monthly neighborhood potluck, is on indefinite hold.
The vaccine has been slow to reach the residents of The Port, but whenever the vaccines are made widely available, it remains to be seen if Port residents, whose distrust of the biotech firms and the local government runs deep, will accept the vaccine at all. According to a Globe/Suffolk University poll published in December, only 11 percent of Black people in Massachusetts said they wanted to get vaccinated as soon as possible compared with 59 percent of white respondents. The Globe spoke to 11 residents for this report and all expressed hesitation.
“In order to get Black and brown folks to be OK with taking the vaccine, it is going to take a huge Herculean effort. You have this serious distrust where either folks don’t want it at all, or they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I’ll take it, but I’ll only take it in Wellesley next to white people,’” said Clark.
Allston-Hughes, however, was eager to receive the vaccine. She wanted her son to visit from Seattle, and to hug her twin great-granddaughters and return her famed Bingo nights to their former glory. At 83, she would have been eligible in the first group of Phase Two; she died nine days after the start of Phase One.
For months, the vaccine had been sitting in freezers some thousand yards away from her apartment inside a white brutalist building in Technology Square. The virus crept into her lungs before the approved vaccine could be injected into her arm.
Before she was placed on the ventilator, she spoke with her son Bobby from an intensive care bed. She was terrified and confused. One morning she was starting her day in the familiar streets of The Port and the next she was hooked up to tubes at Mass. General Hospital.
“They’re going to kill me, Bobby,” she said to her son in Seattle. “I want to go home.”
And that is exactly what they did by putting her on a ventilator!
Related:
"The state continued its vaccine rollout Saturday with the transformation of Roxbury’s Reggie Lewis Center from a local site to a mass vaccination venue with a focus on serving communities of color in Boston. The expanded vaccination facility, along with eased public health restrictions expected to begin Monday for much of the state, come amid recent declines in new daily cases and deaths in Massachusetts due to the virus, but despite advances made against the lethal disease, it continues to take its toll as the Department of Public Health reported 41 new deaths and 1,516 cases due to COVID-19 on Saturday. The state’s latest coronavirus data brought the Massachusetts death toll to 15,744 and the total number of infections to 548,874. The state’s rollout of vaccine has been broadly criticized, including for a cumbersome appointment scheduling website. After being criticized for not doing enough to ensure access to vaccines for people of color, the state has announced a plan to prioritize vaccinations in 20 cities, including Boston. On Saturday, elected officials praised the expansion of the Reggie Lewis site but said more must be done to ensure equity....."
Also see:
"FDA authorizes Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use; Third vaccine will add millions of doses to pandemic armory over the next month" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, February 27, 2021
Drug regulators cleared Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use Saturday, paving the way for the rollout of the third coronavirus vaccine in the US as highly infectious virus variants threaten to undermine progress against the pandemic.
The Food and Drug Administration authorized use of the vaccine, which Johnson & Johnson developed with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the day after a panel of independent scientific advisers agreed in a 22-0 vote that the shot was safe and that its benefits outweighed risks for people 18 and older.
The move pleased Massachusetts health care officials, who emphasized how well the one-shot vaccine performed in a large clinical trial even though the results weren’t as stellar as the two-shot vaccines rolled out by Pfizer-BioNTech and Cambridge-based Moderna.
“This vaccine has been shown to be highly effective in protecting against COVID-19-related hospitalizations and deaths, and those who receive it should have every confidence that they are protected against serious illness due to COVID-19 and its variants,” said Valerie Fleishman, senior vice president at the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association.
Some medical experts said they were disappointed the pharmaceutical giant was producing only a few million doses immediately, given that US taxpayers paid the firm at least $1.5 billion through Operation Warp Speed to develop the vaccine and provide 100 million shots. The FDA was encouraged that the vaccine, which Johnson & Johnson tested on about 44,000 volunteers globally, provided robust protection against virus variants that are widespread in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil.
Although the vaccine’s one-dose regimen is considered a plus, it also raised some questions Friday for members of the FDA panel, officially known as the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
Now why would that be?
Could it be because “…Their vaccination nonsense is also starting to stink to high heaven. What kind of "Health" department tells citizens they must take '2 doses of "A" vaccine', or they will die of the dreaded "CovID-19". Then, after a few weeks of NOBODY showing up at their huge, expensive, taxpayer-funded vaccination centres...they announce that citizens only have to take '1 dose of "B" vaccine.' Vaccine taking is being rolled out like a bargain basement "going out of bidness sale!" Even the brain-dead Sheeple must see from that 'bait and switch' that they're making it all up as they go along!,” as that fine lady asks?
Several medical experts noted that Johnson & Johnson has a late-stage trial testing two doses of the vaccine on 30,000 volunteers. Results are expected in a few months. Committee members expressed concern that if the FDA granted emergency use, the company might need a second authorization if two doses turns out to be more effective than one.
Oh, so you will need two anyway from the people who knew their talc powder gave women cancer and kept a lid on it for decades.
Dr. Dan Barouch, head of the Beth Israel virology center and one of the world’s leading vaccine developers, said that wouldn’t be a problem. “If a two-shot version of the vaccine is even better, then people could be boosted if they want to,” he said Friday evening, but a member of the advisory committee, Dr. Eric Rubin, an immunologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said Saturday that’s easier said then done.
Didn't Barouch work with J&J on this, and why did the Globe omit that?
Something $tinks.
Recipients of the two-dose vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna in Massachusetts typically make appointments to receive a second shot immediately after they get the first. If the Johnson & Johnson study determines that its two-shot vaccine is more effective, he wasn’t sure how health officials would contact people who received one shot. Unlike many other developed countries, he noted, the United States doesn’t have a unified health care system that tracks that information.
Still, Rubin said all three vaccines appear to provide good protection, and he recommended that people take any of them at the earliest opportunity.
“The best vaccine you can get is the one you can get,” he said.....
Where are the civil rights attorneys, 'eh?
Related:
"Dr. Anthony Fauci says that if a coronavirus vaccine is available, regardless of which one, take it. The top US infectious disease expert told NBC on Thursday that a third vaccine becoming available “is nothing but good news” and would help control the pandemic. US regulators said Wednesday that Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine offers strong protection against severe COVID-19. It’s expected to be approved soon. Fauci warned people not to avoid getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine while waiting for the slightly more effective Pfizer or Moderna shots. He said it’s a race “between the virus and getting vaccines into people” and “the longer one waits not getting vaccinated, the better chance the virus has to get a variant or a mutation.” Fauci said public health officials are always concerned about virus variants and stressed the need to wear masks and practice social distancing. The predominant coronavirus variant in the United States is from Britain. Fauci said the vaccines distributed so far “clearly can take care of that particular strain.”
Hold out as long as you can then.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Time to take off the masks and burn them:
"Younger military personnel reject vaccine, in warning for commanders and the nation" by Jennifer Steinhauer New York Times, February 27, 2021
WASHINGTON — Americans who go into the military understand the loss of personal liberty. Many of their daily activities are prescribed, as are their hairstyles, attire and personal conduct.
So when it comes to taking a coronavirus vaccine, many troops — especially younger enlisted personnel as opposed to their officers — see a rare opportunity to exercise free will.
“The Army tells me what, how and when to do almost everything,” said Sgt. Tracey Carroll, who is based at Fort Sill, an Army post in Oklahoma. “They finally asked me to do something and I actually have a choice, so I said no.”
Carroll, 24, represents a broad swath of members of the military — a largely young, healthy set of Americans from every corner of the nation — who are declining to get the shot, which for now is optional among personnel. They cite an array of political and health-related concerns, but this reluctance among younger troops is a warning to civilian health officials about the potential hole in the broad-scale immunity that medical professionals say is needed for Americans to reclaim their collective lives.
Reclaim our lives from who, and who stole them, 'eh?!!!?
“At the end of the day, our military is our society,” said Dr. Michael S. Weiner, the former chief medical officer for the Defense Department, who now serves in the same role for Maximus, a government contractor and technology company. “They have the same social media, the same families, the same issues that society at large has.”
And according to the Demcorats and the pre$$ (one in the same), it is filled with insurrectionists.
Roughly one-third of troops on active duty or in the National Guard have declined to take the vaccine, military officials recently told Congress. In some places, such as Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the nation’s largest military installation, acceptance rates are below 50%.
“We thought we’d be in a better spot in terms of the opt-in rate,” said Col. Joseph Buccino, a spokesman at Fort Bragg, one of the first military sites to offer the vaccine.
While Pentagon officials say they are not collecting specific data on those who decline the vaccine, there is broad agreement that refusal rates are far higher among younger members, and enlisted personnel are more likely to say no than officers. Military spouses appear to share that hesitation: In a December poll of 674 active-duty family members conducted by Blue Star Families, a military advocacy group, 58% said they would not allow their children to receive the vaccine.
For many troops, the reluctance reflects the concerns of civilians who have said in various public health polls that they will not take the vaccine. Many worry the vaccines are unsafe or were developed too quickly.
It's over.
The American people will never accept them, and attempting to force them to take this poison will light the fire of revolution.
Time to call the operation off, a$$holes. The window has closed.
Some of the concerns stem from misinformation that has run rampant on Facebook and other social media, including the false rumor that the vaccine contains a microchip devised to monitor recipients, that it will permanently disable the body’s immune system or that it is some form of government control.
In some ways, vaccines are the new masks: a preventive measure against the virus that has been politicized.
Don't you just want to vomit at the last two paragraphs of spew?
There are many service members like Carroll, officials said, who cite the rare chance to avoid one vaccine among the many required, especially for those who deploy abroad.
Young Americans who are not in the military, and who believe they do not need to worry about becoming seriously ill from the coronavirus, are likely to embrace their own version of defiance, especially in the face of confusing and at times contradictory information about how much protection the vaccine actually offers.
The reported death rates would seem to back up the healthy youth, as they are in minimal if any danger.
That is if you accept the CV-19 fraud as fact; if not, well.... are closed. No need for vaccine in any event.
“I don’t think anyone likes being told what to do,” Weiner said. “There is a line in the American DNA that says, ‘Just tell me what to do so I know what to push back on.’”
Other troops cite the anthrax vaccine, which was believed to cause adverse effects in members of the military in the late 1990s, as evidence that the military should not be on the front lines of a new vaccine.
In many cases, the reasons for refusal include all of the above.
A 24-year-old female airman first class in Virginia said she declined the shot even though she is an emergency medical worker, as did many in her squadron. She shared her views only on the condition of anonymity because, like most enlisted members, she is not permitted to speak to the news media without official approval.
“I would prefer not to be the one testing this vaccine,” she explained in an email. She also said that because vaccine access had become a campaign theme during the 2020 race for the White House, she was more skeptical, and added that some of her colleagues had told her they would rather separate from the military than take the vaccine should it become mandatory.
They know who she is now via email!
Thanks for outing her, NYT!
The military has been offering the vaccine to older personnel, troops on the medical front lines, immediate response and contingency forces, some contractors who fall into those groups and some dependents of active-duty troops.
Hundreds of thousands of people in those categories have received shots so far.
The vaccine, unlike many other inoculations, is not required by the military at this time because it has been approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration. Once it becomes a standard, approved vaccine, the military can order troops to take the shot.
Then time to resign your commission or take the dishonorable discharge.
Good luck fighting the wars!
The prevalence of fear about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine has frustrated military officials.
“There is a lot of misinformation out there,” Robert Salesses, an acting assistant secretary of defense, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. One member of the committee, Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., suggested that the military personnel who refused vaccines “risk an entire community” where bases are.
While military leaders insist that vaccine acceptance rates will rise as safety information continues to spread, officials and advocacy groups are scrambling to improve the rates, holding information sessions with health care leaders like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. On some bases, health care workers follow up with those who refuse the vaccine to explore their reasons.
This past week, the Army held live sessions on Facebook with high-ranking officers to press the message that the vaccine was a boon, and hundreds of commenters balked throughout. “It has not been proven this vaccine saves lives,” one person wrote.
The concern is felt at the top tier of the Pentagon’s leadership. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III released a video saying, “You know, I’ve taken it myself. After talking with my doctor, I believed it was the right thing to do, not only for my health, but also for my ability to do the job and to contribute to our readiness,” Austin said.
I'm sure he got the saline.
Many public health experts say that such appeals from leaders on high may be the least effective method to convince groups that distrust government or authority figures. “Many enlisted folks watch an admiral getting a shot and say, ‘I don’t see me in you at this point in my life,’” Weiner noted. “I appreciate you got a vaccine, but that’s not me.”
And you know what they say about trust.
Staff Sgt. Jack Jay, who is stationed at an Army base at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, has heard every manner of fear, distrust and wild conspiracy theories from his peers — and has tried to gently share his own views.
“The reasons go from political, to the history of unproven research being carried out, and because of our age group and health we are not a high risk population of hospitalization,” said Jay, 33, who has already taken his shot. “The best I feel that I can do is respect the other person’s reasons even though I may not agree,” he said, “however, if one of my peers makes false statements as if they are true, I will challenge them to back up their argument with legitimate sources.”
The thread of politics that weaves through those discussions complicates the conversation, Jay said, and reflects those he sees on Facebook and elsewhere outside the military.
“The Army is just a good barometer of what will most likely happen nationally, due to the thought processes of our country at this current moment,” he said.
In making decisions, “the biggest factor is do you know someone who got the vaccine,” said Jennifer Akin, a director of applied research at Blue Star Families. “There are so many narratives out there, it’s hard to know what to do. We are trying to provide people with trustworthy information from trustworthy sources.”
And who would they be?
The lying military and pre$$ in the pockets of Big Pharma?
Related:
"Just five weeks ago, Los Angeles County was conducting more than 350,000 weekly coronavirus tests, including at a massive drive-through site at Dodger Stadium, as health workers raced to contain the worst COVID-19 hotspot in the United States. Now, county officials say testing has nearly collapsed. More than 180 government-supported sites are operating at only a third of their capacity. “It’s shocking how quickly we’ve gone from moving at 100 miles an hour to about 25,” said Dr. Clemens Hong, who leads the county’s testing operation. After a year of struggling to boost testing, communities across the country are seeing plummeting demand, shuttering testing sites, or even trying to return supplies. The drop in screening comes at a significant moment in the outbreak: Experts are cautiously optimistic that COVID-19 is receding after killing more than 500,000 people in the United States but concerned that emerging variants could prolong the epidemic. “Everyone is hopeful for rapid, widespread vaccinations, but I don’t think we’re at a point where we can drop our guard just yet,” said Hong. “We just don’t have enough people who are immune to rule out another surge.” US testing hit a peak on Jan. 15, when the country was averaging more than 2 million tests per day. Since then, the average number of daily tests has fallen more than 28 percent. The drop mirrors declines across all major virus measures since January, including new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Officials say those encouraging trends, together with harsh winter weather, the end of the holiday travel season, pandemic fatigue, and a growing focus on vaccinations are sapping interest in testing, but testing remains important for tracking and containing the outbreak. President Biden has promised to revamp the nation’s testing system by investing billions more in supplies and government coordination, but with demand falling fast, the country may soon have a glut of unused supplies. The United States will be able to conduct nearly 1 billion monthly tests by June, according to projections from researchers at Arizona State University. That’s more than 25 times the country’s current rate of about 40 million tests reported per month....."
The te$ting regime has become a criminal fraud given the inaccuracy of the tests.
"At-Home COVID testing is here" by Wudan Yan New York Times, February 27, 2021
In case you missed it: You can now get tested for the coronavirus in the comfort of your own home.
This is great news, especially for people who don’t have access to a testing site. Currently, these portable tests come in two flavors. The first is test-by-mail kits, which allow patients to swab their noses at home and mail them to a laboratory for a result in a day or two. The other types are called at-home tests, which give an answer on the spot.
Currently, the Food and Drug Administration has authorized dozens of test-by-mail kits, and three at-home tests.
These tests are not nearly as accurate as those taken in a clinic, but experts say coronavirus tests that can be done at home play an important role as the country continues to reopen. “They get actionable information in people’s hands quickly,” said Jennifer Bacci, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Pharmacy.
Of course, no coronavirus diagnostic test is 100% accurate. Even the gold-standard nasopharyngeal swab, given at many clinics, can return a negative result even though you might be carrying the coronavirus, and these tests only inform you about a single point in time, but even if home tests may be less accurate, they can quickly alert people if they test positive.
It's the EXACT OPPOSITE according to their own damn reporting, so what gives?
Certainly the market for home test kits will likely grow, said Gigi Gronvall, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, but with more options, consumers will need to learn what test is best for them.
NONE!
Here are some key questions to consider when deciding on an at-home testing kit.
Q: What are the trade-offs between mail-in kits and fully at-home tests?
A: Test-by-mail kits require users to purchase a kit, take a sample at home and ship the swab back to a lab. These kits take more processing time and use a method called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to detect the coronavirus.
PCR works by identifying and magnifying specific gene sequences. “It can take a very small signal and amplify it,” to detect smaller amounts of the virus, said Gronvall. These tests are highly sensitive, picking up positive cases nearly all the time (accuracy varies by lab, and false negatives can be as high as 20%). “A negative PCR isn’t perfect, but it gives a high degree of assurance,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Related:
He wants vaccinations around the clock, the $ick fuck, and he reeks of de$peration on the cu$p of madne$$, does he not?
Fully at-home tests, such as those made by Ellume and Abbott, require users to swab their noses and drop the swabs in a liquid. The tests provide an answer in as little as 15 minutes for the Abbott test and 20 minutes for Ellume.
These tests look for antigens — parts of microbes that cause an immune response. Unlike PCR, antigen tests do not amplify signals, which makes them faster but less accurate. These rapid antigen tests, Gronvall said, are good for measuring how contagious you are. “If you test positive on that, you really need to isolate,” she said, and get a clinical swab done to confirm the results.
False negatives, however, are much more common with antigen tests, meaning infected people might think they are virus free, especially if they are not having symptoms.
That's because they are!
Remember, any test’s ability to detect coronavirus depends on how much virus is in the location of your body where you are taking a sample. Tests taken early, say, hours after a potential virus exposure, have a higher chance of resulting in a false negative. If you have symptoms, either a PCR-based test or an antigen test will likely be able to confirm you have it.
Excuse me for cracking up laughing!
Must be why they want to swab your ass instead of checking your nose and throat as real science would suggest.
Q: What should you check for on the box?
A: Make sure that the home test or collection kit you’re looking to buy has an emergency use authorization from the FDA (it will be printed on the box) and that the company works with certified lab partners. Also look for tests that offer a telemedicine consult, advised Dr. Marisa Cruz, head of clinical affairs at Everylywell, a company that makes at-hime health tests, including one for the coronavirus, so you can discuss your diagnosis and next steps.
If you test positive on either a mail-in PCR or an at-home antigen test, you are likely to be infected and presumed contagious, said Bacci, so isolate from others and continue to monitor your symptoms. Repeat testing can help track the disease course, if, say, someone goes from being asymptomatic to displaying symptoms.
And if you have no symptoms?
Negative results are more likely to be wrong than positive ones. “A negative result does not necessarily mean you do not have COVID-19, which is the same interpretation for either an at-home test, a mail-in test or one offered in a doctor’s office,” said Cruz. Continue to wear masks, socially distance and practice good hygiene, especially if you have symptoms or known contacts with others with COVID-19.
FUCK OFF THEN!
Q: What does the future of at-home testing look like?
A: Beyond saliva and nasal swabs, some scientists are looking to develop devices that look like breathalyzers to detect chemicals in an individual’s breath that correspond to coronavirus infection.
Oh, great, more false positives!
Pelagia-Iren Gouma, a materials engineer at Ohio State University, and her colleagues are testing a small breathalyzer they have developed that can be used for up to one year and would cost perhaps a few dollars per device. Users would get an answer in 15 seconds, and the test appears to be accurate 96% of the time and can be reused, Gouma said. The device was submitted to the FDA and has been awaiting emergency use authorization since September.
Experts hope that as the market for at-home testing expands, the options will grow and become cheaper. The cheaper the tests are, the more likely the government will subsidize them and consumers will buy them for routine testing, and the more testing, the better. As the world slowly reopens, home-based tests will help people navigate their decisions.....
For $ome anyway.
It was a test just to get this post up, folks, because I certainly enjoyed my time away from the Boston Globe this weekend. Three days away from the lies really helped my outlook on things.
