T. Belman. This article refutes Zelenko. Goepfert said;
“A 90 percent decrease in risk of infections, and 94 percent effectiveness against hospitalization for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is fantastic,”
Sounds unreal. Where does that come from?
by Matt Windsor, UAB NEWS July 06, 2021
Many Americans say they want to “make sure the shot is safe” before getting vaccinated. That data is already in, and it is overwhelming.
In his nearly 30 years studying vaccines, Paul Goepfert, M.D., director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has never seen any vaccine as effective as the three COVID vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson — currently available in the United States.
“A 90 percent decrease in risk of infections, and 94 percent effectiveness against hospitalization for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is fantastic,” he said.
But what makes vaccine experts such as Goepfert confident that COVID vaccines are safe in the long term? We have all seen billboards and TV infomercials from law firms seeking people harmed by diet drugs or acid-reflux medicines for class-action lawsuits. What makes Goepfert think that scientists would not discover previously unsuspected problems caused by COVID vaccines in the years ahead?
There are several reasons, actually. Vaccines, given in one- or two-shot doses, are very different from medicines that people take every day, potentially for years. And decades of vaccine history — plus data from more than a billion people who have received COVID vaccines starting last December — provide powerful proof that there is little chance that any new dangers will emerge from COVID vaccines.
The majority of Americans who have not been vaccinated — or who say they are hesitant about vaccinating their children — report that safety is their main concern. Nearly a quarter of respondents in Gallup surveys in March and April 2021 said they wanted to confirm the vaccine was safe before getting the shot. And 26 percent of respondents in a survey of parents with children ages 12-15 by the Kaiser Family Foundation in April 2021 said they wanted to “wait a while to see how the vaccine is working” before deciding to get their child vaccinated.
But Goepfert says we already know enough to be confident the COVID vaccines are safe. Here is why, starting with the way vaccines work and continuing through strong evidence from vaccine history and the even stronger evidence from the responses of people who have received COVID-19 vaccines worldwide over the past six months.
Vaccines are eliminated quickly
Unlike many medications, which are taken daily, vaccines are generally one-and-done. Medicines you take every day can cause side effects that reveal themselves over time, including long-term problems as levels of the drug build up in the body over months and years.
“Vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body,” Goepfert said. “This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn’t expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine.”
Vaccine side effects show up within weeks if at all
That is not to say that there have never been safety issues with vaccines. But in each instance, these have appeared soon after widespread use of the vaccine began.
“The side effects that we see occur early on, and that’s it,” Goepfert said. “In virtually all cases, vaccine side effects are seen within the first two months after rollout.”
The only vaccine program that might compare with the scale and speed of the COVID rollout is the original oral polio vaccine in the 1950s. When this vaccine was first introduced in the United States in 1955, it used a weakened form of the polio virus that in very rare cases — about one in 2.4 million recipients — became activated and caused paralysis. (Compare this with the 60,000 children infected with polio in the United States in 1952, and the more than 3,000 children who died from the disease in the United States that year.) Cases of vaccine-induced paralysis occurred between one and four weeks after vaccination. None of the COVID vaccines uses a weakened form of the SARS-CoV-2 virus — all train the body to recognize a piece of the virus known as the spike protein and generate antibodies that can attack the virus in case of a real infection.
In 1976, a vaccine against swine flu that was widely distributed in the United States was identified in rare cases (approximately one in 100,000) as a cause of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, in which the immune system attacks the nerves. Almost all of these cases occurred in the eight weeks after a person received the vaccine. But the flu itself also can cause Guillain-Barré Syndrome; in fact, the syndrome occurs 17 times more frequently after natural flu infection than after vaccination.
COVID vaccine experience over the past six months
“By the time the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines were approved for emergency use in the United States in December 2020, we already knew the short-term side effects very well from the efficacy studies,” Goepfert said. “Pfizer and Moderna — and later Johnson & Johnson and then Novavax, which reported on its phase III trial results in June 2021 — all have enrolled 30,000-plus individuals, half of whom got the vaccine and half of whom got a placebo initially, after which all the placebo group got the vaccine.
The side effects seen in these studies, and again in the nationwide rollouts that began in December 2020, were tolerability issues, Goepfert says, mainly arm pain, fatigue and headache. These are very transient, and occur a day or two days after the vaccine. They then resolve quickly.
As of June 12, 2021, more than 2.33 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, according to the New York Times vaccinations tracker.
Goepfert says that, between December and June, we began to see the more-rare side effects that do not show up until millions of people have gotten the vaccine.
About one in 100,000 people receiving the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine have experienced a clotting disorder known as thrombotic thrombocytopenia, including 79 cases among more than 20 million people receiving this vaccine in the United Kingdom, and 19 deaths. A smaller number of cases have occurred with Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine as well, Goepfert says.
“The causes are still being worked out; but when this happens, it occurs from six days to two weeks after vaccination,” he said. “More recently, an even more rare side effect — myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle — has been reported in people receiving Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. That is about one in a million, or possibly higher rates in some populations; but again, all of these occur no more than a month after the vaccination.”
On July 12, 2021, the FDA announced that in rare cases (100 reports out of 12.8 million shots given in the United States), the J&J vaccine is associated with Guillan-Barré syndrome. The cases were mostly reported two weeks after injection and mostly in men age 50 and older.
Weighing the odds
Any risk is frightening, especially for a parent. But the rare side effects identified with COVID vaccines have to be weighed against the known, higher risks from contracting COVID, Goepfert says. It is not clear how COVID variants such as the highly infectious Delta mutation may affect patients. Early indications are that Delta infections bring more severe side effects than other forms of COVID, but that vaccines are still protective against Delta.
It is COVID infection, and the growing evidence of persistent symptoms from what has become known as “long COVID,” that are the most troubling unknown out there, Goepfert says.
“The long-term side effects of COVID infection are a major concern,” Goepfert said. “Up to 10 percent of people who have COVID experience side effects such as difficulty thinking, pain, tiredness, loss of taste and depression. We don’t know why that is, how long these symptoms will last or if there are effective ways to treat them. That is the most troubling unknown for me.”
Even as cases, hospitalizations and deaths have declined significantly in Alabama since January, there are still nearly 250 new COVID cases diagnosed and nearly 10 deaths reported statewide per day as of mid-June
“Many people worry that these vaccines were ‘rushed’ into use and still do not have full FDA approval — they are currently being distributed under Emergency Use Authorizations,” Goepfert said. “But because we have had so many people vaccinated, we actually have far more safety data than we have had for any other vaccine, and these COVID vaccines have an incredible safety track record. There should be confidence in that.”
“Many people worry that these vaccines were ‘rushed’ into use and still do not have full FDA approval — they are currently being distributed under Emergency Use Authorizations,” Goepfert said. “But because we have had so many people vaccinated, we actually have far more safety data than we have had for any other vaccine, and these COVID vaccines have an incredible safety track record. There should be confidence in that.”
These COVID statistics, reported by Arutz Sheva on August 13, obviously give a more accurate picture of the effectiveness of the vaccines than the older CDC studies.
@Adam
It was no trouble, his article was badly reasoned and logically flawed. I am not in Israel, though, but in the US, but I don’t sleep much in any case and have more freedom to wright at night. You should read the comment I posted to Ted about the 94% and 90% values this author referenced. It seems there was a couple of studies that were very weakly based with wide statistical data collected that relates to his comments. It is just below this comment I am currently writing. Besides the data being weak due to the limited size, it is very out of date as it was written 3 and 4 months ago and the data was older than that. This means that it was well before any of the breakthroughs that are currently known to be escalating. If this Pharma puff piece convinced anyone to be vaccinated, I would be very surprised.
I totally agree with you about the safety issues on the vaccines. There is no way to gain any confidence that the vaccines are safe as the safety data was deliberately halted after a few months, well below the 2yrs needed in vaccines produced with routine rigorous testing that is well absent in these vaccines. It is not even known if the spike proteins are done being produced after a few months. There is no knowledge regarding the effect of the spike protein’s effect on kidney function, liver function, mentation, reproductive status, cardiac effects, blood pressure, dermatological conditions, vision, tumor production….I could list several pages of medical that are unknown. So, I strongly agree with your thoughts on the safety of the vaccines. People who take the vaccines at this point must accept the risks that have been raised over these past few months. It is more than those who lined up so readily in Jan/Feb had to inform their decisions. I suspect that this is why the vaccines are being administered at such a reduced rate. It is really not a question of if they are safe – only Pharma and the director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham would claim they are. No wonder he sited the polio vaccine for support of their safety, Lol.
@Ted
It was my belief that the values listed in this article 90% and 94% were associated with the EUA data, but the data doesn’t match. I have since found the 2 studies that he is citing, but they are quite limited in the data collected.
Study 1:
There is a study that was released in May which was conducted by the CDC. Here is the punchline:
The problem with the findings here is that the study was conducted with a very small sample size which gave the study a very wide confidence interval. For anyone not familiar with reading statistics, a 95% confidence interval lists the values between which the true value is certain to exist with a 95% confidence. For example, when they state that “Adjusted vaccine effectiveness (VE) against COVID-19–associated hospitalization among adults aged ?65 years was estimated to be 94% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 49%–99%) for full vaccination”
What is meant here is that for the people 65+ years, they estimated the vaccines created a 94% chance of reducing hospitalization but if they are wrong, then the true value is between 49% and 99% chance of reducing hospitalization. There is no way to narrow this range, and the true value is as likely to be 49% as it is 99% or any number between them.
The study was too small, as they only included 187 test subjects, in spite of the fact that they vaccinated 2.3 billion people. Also they mixed data between Phizer and Moderna just to get the 187 subjects. The obvious conclusion should be to redo the study with larger sample size to collect better data. The control group included 230 people. They used self collection of data and reporting so, “vaccination status might have been misclassified, or participants might have had imperfect recollection of vaccination or illness onset dates.”
The imbalance in the test:placebo groups is concerning as it calls into question if some of the test subject might have been dropped from the study and if they were, 2 important questions arise:
1. why were they dropped
2. How did that predjudice the outcome.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7018e1.htm
Study 2:
There was also a study released in April:
This study looked at person-days following front line workers received vaccination to look for breakthrough cases to estimate effectiveness. Due to the low levels of breakthroughs the confidence intervals were wide, but not so bad as the above study:
Estimated adjusted vaccine effectiveness of full immunization was 90% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 68%–97%); vaccine effectiveness of partial immunization was 80% (95% CI = 59%–90%)
So, they estimated that the vaccine was effective in creating 90% effective, but if that is wrong, the true value is certain to be between 68% and 97% with a 95% confidence. The study used self testing kits and relied upon the test subjects to collect the samples and package them correctly to prevent increasing the effective value when errors occured by technique or shipping delays.
*It should be recalled that the CDC has called for using a lower sensitivity with post-vaccinated subjects(28ct) than non-vaccinated subjects(upto40ct) which means the sensitivities could be quite different between the two groups. They don’t list if the same settings were used for these studies or not, but it would be significant if they did not.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_w
Many thanks, Peloni, for responding to my crib du coeur so quickly. When I first wrote to you asking you to fact-check the article, it was in the wee hours of the morning, when you must have been fast asleep. Even now it must be about 5.45 am Israeli time, which is earlier than when most people wake up and get to their desks. Thanks for your dedication to informing us.
My own problems with the author’s claims are those of a layman without sufficient scientific and medical background to be able to form a well-informed opinion based on my personal study of these subjects, clinical experience treating patients, etc.. But I can read what the experts in the field say. And some highly qualified scientists and medical practitioners, including a Nobel prize winner, disagree with this authors’ conclusions.
At least as published here, the author does not cite any sources for his facts and figures. That makes his factual claims, in my opinion, unreliable and possibly incorrect.
The author leaves out of his account some statistics from what I think are reliable and accurate sources, that raise doubts about the safety of the vaccines.
Several of these sources say that the VAERS government reporting system has received tens of thousands of reports of adverse reactions, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 to 6,000 deaths associated with it. VAERS itslef has not published any figues on the total number of illnesses and deaths associated with vaccination-which they obviously should do. But independent reseachers who have gone through VAERS data base of individual illnesses associated withthe vaccine have added up these numbers. This author’s account gives much lower figures for adverse reactions to the vaccines.
These sources also say that the number of adverse reactions and deaths associated with the Covid19 vaccines are about eight times larger than all of the adverse reactions to other vaccines reported to VAERS over the preceding ten years. A much higher number of adverse reactions to these vaccines than to the ones for other illnesses is obviously cause for concern. The author does not address these reports.
While the author creates the impression that the vaccines have largely defeated the virus by reducing the hospitalization and death rates by over 90 per cent, he does not mention or much the less explain why so many epidemiologists have been issuing dire warnings that Covid19 is about to make a major comeback, including a massive rise in cases and hospitalizations, as soon as the next two months. If the vaccines are as effective as he says they are, why are the experts so worried about a resurgence?
THe author claims that the overwhelming majority of seriously ill patients who have become seriously ill with COVID19 are unvaccinated. While that was true during the first six months of the year, reports over the past several weeks indicate a sharp increase in the number of fully vaccinated patients who have become ill with COVID. A recent report from Israeli hospitals indicated that fully vaccinated individuals are actually the majority of patients being treated for symptomatic COVID19. This suggests that the prophyactic effects of the vaccine have begun to wane, and vaccination is now less likely to protect people from getting the disease than it was last December-January when mass vaccination began.
Peloni points out that the author’s citation of the safety of vaccines previously developed to treat other illnesses is not relavant to the question of whether the new vaccines developed to treat Covid19. That is because the new mNRA vaccines operate on different scientific principles than earlier vaccines, and trigger different chemical reactions in the human body.
T author does not address the doubts that some physicians have expressed over the past year or more concerning the accuracy of government and WHO statistics concerning the number of COVID cases, and the number of COVID-caused deaths. It has been documented that world goverments, the CDC and WHO have employed various reporting techniques that incentivise doctors’ labeling respiratory illnesses they have treated as COVID, when they might have been other respiratory illnesses, such as influenza or non-COVID-related pneumonia.
The author does not even mention these concerns.
The author does not address the discrepancy between the WHO, government and Johns Hopkins reports of the number of COVID cases and fatalities, which are very precise down to nine figures, and their figures for the number of cases of all other illnesses, which are extremely imprecise estimates. Until COVID was identified as a new illness in December 2019, these official sources gave only very rough estimates of the number of people suffering from all diseases. And they continue to report only rough estimates of the number of victims of all other diseases except COVID. This makes the specificity of the COVID statistics very suspect, since he have no way of comparing them to the numbers of victims of other illnesses.
Peloni’s critique of the problems with this article are much better informed than mine. But this is my layman’s take on the article. I am still not convinced that the vaccines are safe.
@retired22
A similar thing to India occured in Mexico. The cases and recovery associated with IVM in Mexico are seen in the graph at the link below:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Email-4-Img-6-Mexico.png
The media kept this quiet for several months, but then Mexico city had an outbreak in June, and they used IVM again and the original story about the Jan. outbreak was revealed.
@Adam
The author also goes on to state that “Early indications are that Delta infections bring more severe side effects than other forms of COVID, but that vaccines are still protective against Delta.” This is flat out untrue. Viruses become less virulent(disease causing) and more infective in an attempt to coexist with their hosts in a process called attenuation. It doesn’t always work this way, as they can create more lethal viruses, as the author claims is true with this Delta strain, but this is not what has been seen in India, where Delta originated, or in England or in the US or in Israel, that is until Israel embarked upon this 3rd shot. Only Israel where they have administered this 3rd shot, and the deaths began nearly the day that the 3rd shot began. There is a question there that is more supportable than the Dec. deaths being associated with the vaccine rollouts.
It should be noted that the vaccine trials for each drug study included ~35k people, but no one in the 75+ year range and no African Americans. Phizer did have 7 African Americans in the Placebo but none in the actual testing group, not one. The EUA testing was useless without these groups, as they younger populations without comorbidities held no chance of seriously testing the vaccines. That is until Dec when the very first to be vaccinated were the elderly and the African Americans as they were termed ‘most at risk’ and were moved to the front of the line for vaccination. The thousands of elderly that died following those early vaccines were quite concerning given the lack of testing and safety triggers to stop the vaccines. Perhaps the elder care centers that had their entire population hospitalized or died following testing was unrelated to the safey issues of the vax. For the elderly there were no clinical trials, no autopsies, no oversight and no treatments. It seem something could be learned from that seeing that Israel is undergoing another round of testing.
If you have an interest in the EUA trials, let me know. They were quite scandalous, though everyone, including the author above, talks about the 95% elective stat. Quite unsupportable.
/3
2. strong evidence from vaccine history – the author states “That is not to say that there have never been safety issues with vaccines. But in each instance, these have appeared soon after widespread use of the vaccine began” but this is because these historical vaccines were not gene therapies that used your body to produce massive amounts of protein for however many weeks or months that they do.
He then makes the bold statement that “In virtually all cases, vaccine side effects are seen within the first two months after rollout” but how does he know this. There is NO SAFETY MONITORING in any country in the world that tracks the safety of these experimental vax. VAERS is not a safety monitoring program. It is a safety reporting system that between 90-99% of reports go unreported as was found in a Harvard study. FDA/CDC could and should have required safety monitoring, especially due to the fact everyone would be involve in the vaccine program and there was no preclinical/clinical/safety testing that is routinely collected for every other vaccine created.
The author goes on to describe unrelated history of polio and Swine flu vax to what purpose beyond lengthening his statement I am not sure.
3. even stronger evidence from the responses of people who have received COVID-19 vaccines worldwide over the past six months – he notes that 2.3 billion people are vaccinated and then cites just Guillan-Barré syndrome associated with J/J, myocarditis with Pfizer and Moderna and thrombotic thrombocytopenia associated with Astrozeneca. He cites occurences of these diseases but ignores the thousands of people who are documented to have died following the vax. The author is the head of Vaccine Research Clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, so he is no layman. Hence, when he says “But because we have had so many people vaccinated, we actually have far more safety data than we have had for any other vaccine” he is not dressing this as factual support of the vaccines not knowing that this is no support of the vaccines. Vaccine efficacy and safety are proven in drug trials where testing measurements can be collected to compare with the general population to show a statistical difference or none at all. This slight of hand using history of safe vaccines and obsuring the fact that these new gene therapies produce massive amounts of protein that last for unknown periods in the body and then states things are safe because everyone is vaccinated, well, this is not what I was taught as science.
/2
@Adam
This article is very concerning. Lots to unpack here, and it will take some time. Appologies to any who find this too long, but it is a long article and there is much to refute, or question. The author states that
He is claiming that “decades of vaccine history” is “powerful proof that there is little chance that any new dangers will emerge from COVID vaccines”. This is balderdash. These are mRNA vaccines and Adenovirus-vector vaccines that are completely unrelatable to any other vaccines. In any case, the efficacy of the flu vaccine can’t claim support of safety from some past successful vaccine – what crap science is this?
He then goes on to state that “we already know enough to be confident the COVID vaccines are safe” and he relates this to 3 things
1. the way vaccines work
2. strong evidence from vaccine history
3. even stronger evidence from the responses of people who have received COVID-19 vaccines worldwide over the past six months
Each of these fail to provide the vaccines are safe.
1. the way vaccines work- “Vaccines are eliminated quickly”. That is simply not true. We have no idea how long it will take for the mRNA or Adeno vaxes to be eliminated, but it is easily not quickly. A routine vaccine injects a small amount of protein that acts as a stimulus that creates an immune response and that immune response creates immunity. But the mRNA/Adeno vax inject something that takes over a portion of your body’s cells to produce massive amounts of protein(spike) that is produced for weeks or months, we don’t know how long it goes on and we don’t know how much protein is created, but it is way way larger than protein amounts in regular vaccines, which are intended to have a very temporary presence in the body. In any case these massive amounts of spike are what creates the immune response and that creates immunity which is quite temporary it seems. He ends by relating once mor”Vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body” – this is very different from what is known of these mRNA/Adeno vax.
/1
Alabama U. is a spook school. No credibility.
From the Los Angeles Times via Yahoo News. The Daily Mail UK had a large article with photgraphs yesterdat about the incident. But it had mysteriously disappeared from the DM site by today.
These men in black with masks on seem remarkably like the Brownshirts who broke up opposition rallies during th Weimat Republic’s election campaigns.
One person stabbed as COVID anti-vaxxers and counterdemonstrators clash in front of L.A. City Hall
Sat, August 14, 2021, 7:15 PM
LOS ANGELES, CA – AUGUST 14, 2021 – – Advocates against vaccine mandates, left, confront pro-vaccine advocates in front of the L.A.P.D. Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles on August 14, 2021. One man was stabbed during the melee and was taken by paramedics to a nearby hospital. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Advocates against vaccine mandates, left, confront pro-vaccine advocates in front of the Los Angeles police headquarters in downtown L.A. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
An anti-vaccine rally at Los Angeles City Hall turned violent Saturday, with one person stabbed and a reporter saying he was assaulted, according to police and protesters on the scene.
A crowd of several hundred people, many holding American flags and signs calling for “medical freedom,” had descended on City Hall around 2 p.m. for the planned rally. A few dozen counterprotesters had amassed on 1st Street near the former offices of the L.A. Times before the clash.
A fight erupted on the corner of 1st and Spring streets shortly after 2:30 p.m., as counterprotesters in all black and anti-vaccine demonstrators draped in American flag garb and Trump memorabilia traded punches and threw things at one another. It was not immediately clear how the fight started, though each side quickly blamed the other.
A Los Angeles police officer tries to stop the bleeding of a man who was stabbed.
An LAPD officer tries to stop the bleeding of a man stabbed in Saturday’s clash downtown. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
One person, who the anti-mask protesters claim was part of their rally, could be seen collapsed in the intersection, bleeding. Police on the scene said the person had been stabbed, and paramedics arrived to take him to a hospital.
In the melee, counterprotesters could be seen spraying mace while members of the anti-vaccine rally screamed death threats. One older man screamed, “unmask them all,” and clawed at a woman’s face.
Capt. Stacy Spell, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, said police were monitoring the protest.
An anti-vaxxer confronts a pair of vaccine advocates.
An anti-vaxxer confronts a pair of vaccine advocates in front of LAPD headquarters Saturday. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
A vaccine opponent, left, attacks journalist Tina Desiree Berg
A vaccine opponent, left, attacks Status Coup journalist Tina Desiree Berg. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
“We are on scene to maintain order after a fight broke out between Antifa and people gathered for the permitted event. We are aware of one male that was stabbed and is being treated by Fire Department personnel,” Spell said in a statement. “No arrests have been made but [the] investigation is ongoing.”
Spell could not immediately provide an update on the victim’s injuries. While the statement referred to “Antifa,” the counterprotesters appeared to be a mixture of people who have shown up to oppose anti-vaccine and anti-mask rallies in recent months.
A short time later, KPCC reporter Frank Stoltze could be seen walking out of the park near City Hall being screamed at by anti-mask protesters. One man could be seen kicking him. Stoltze later told a police officer he had been assaulted while trying to conduct an interview. Spell confirmed that a police report was taken.
Stoltze later tweeted this statement: “Something happened to me today that’s never happened in 30 yrs of reporting. In LA. ?@LAist? I was shoved, kicked and my eyeglasses were ripped off of my face by a group of guys at a protest – outside City Hall during an anti-vax Recall ?@GavinNewsom? Pro Trump rally.”
Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez also decried the violence in a tweet.
“These aren’t ‘patriots’. Not wearing a mask and being anti-vax isn’t patriotism – it’s stupidity,” she said. “We have to be able to have differences of opinions without resorting to violence.”
By late afternoon, a small crowd of counter-protesters, mostly dressed in all black, remained near LAPD headquarters, but police had formed skirmish lines to separate the two groups.
Los Angeles police separate clashing protesters
Los Angeles police separate clashing protesters. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
The demonstrators had billed the rally as a stand against rules requiring COVID-19 vaccinations and so-called vaccine passports and said they also opposed wearing masks. A flier advertising the counterdemonstration decried the group as fascists.
There is no blanket rule mandating that people get vaccinated in California, but some cities have or are considering requiring proof of vaccination to enter certain businesses. New York City became the first major city to do so earlier this month, followed by San Francisco and New Orleans.
Earlier this week, the Los Angeles City Council voted to direct city attorneys to draft a law that would require people to have at least one dose of a vaccine to visit indoor restaurants, bars, gyms, shops and movie theaters. Much of the plan has yet to be worked out, and the full City Council still must approve the proposed law after it’s written up.
L.A. County officials are also considering instituting their own public vaccine verification rules.
Last month, L.A. County reimposed a rule requiring people to wear masks in indoor public spaces amid a surge in new infections fueled by the highly transmissible Delta variant.
County public health officials Saturday reported more than 4,200 new cases of the virus and said unvaccinated people are about four times more likely to contract it. Although vaccinated people can still become infected, they are about 14 times less likely to be hospitalized, and almost no fully vaccinated people are dying from COVID-19, the county public health department said.
Times staff writers Emily Alpert Reyes and Luke Money contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
And I can find dozens of top notch doctors who will say just the opposite.
this article smells bad to me.
There are at least 40 or 50 smaller & poorer nations that can’t afford the vaccines but have had outstanding success with
Ivermectin.
Ivermectin which has been out in the prescription drug market for at least the last 40 years & proven to be safe.
India is the largest of those nations I mentioned.
India started out with a vaccine & the people were dying like flys from the virus.
They switched over,in desperation,to ivermectin & since then the virus has been brought down to the nuisance level.
This article is consistent with information I have received from doctors who are currently practicing medicine and well informed.
My dastardly computer program has done it again! Could fact-check this for us, Peloni?
Pelota, could you fact-check this for us?