#vaccination center

[familymd]

Protect yourself and others with our comprehensive COVID Testing and Vaccination services. We offer a range of diagnostic options, including rapid COVID-19 tests, antibody testing, and PCR testing. Stay informed about your COVID-19 status with accurate and reliable results.

[centers-for-disease-control]

Hey, it is the holiday time of year which is a time that comes with lots of large gatherings to celebrate. With this time also comes Covid and flu outbreaks. Get vaccinated

Check out vaccines.gov to find vaccines near you

[ricisidro]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory group today recommended a second 2024-25 COVID-19 vaccine dose, spaced 6 months apart, for people ages 65 and older and for people in younger age-groups who have moderate or severe immunocompromising conditions.

The group also recommended an extra dose, three or more, in people with immunocompromising conditions.

#SARSCOV2 #COVID19

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/cdc-vaccine-advisers-recommend-second-covid-vaccine-dose-seniors-immune-compromised

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

The Palestinian Center of Human Rights is a respected organization by the human rights community. 

It is also insanely antisemitic.

The headline of a news release this week says, "Latest Israeli Displacement Orders Further Prove Their Genocidal Nature.

The very things the IDF does to avoid civilian casualties in order to get to Hamas targets hidden in civilian areas are being viewed as evidence of genocide!

The press release says this statement that no sane person could write: "The establishment of these so-called ‘humanitarian safe zones’ reveals a genocidal pattern designed to forcibly displace Palestinians to areas lacking essential services necessary for their survival. "

If the IDF wanted them dead, why spend the time and effort and resources to ask them (not force them) to leave?

That's not even the only example in this very press release of interpreting Israeli actions to save Gazan lives as genocidal.

Israel has been working hard with UNICEF and WHO to bring polio vaccines into Gaza, a complex undertaking to do safely. Over 1.2 million doses have been imported. The entire operation is complicated by the fact that thse vaccines must be kept cool, so appropriate cooling equipment must also be brought in and there must be assurance that they will work during power outages. The entire operation so far has been accomplished in only a couple of weeks.

Israel has also appointed a brigadier general whose only job is to coordinate with international organizations for aid delivery and distribution into Gaza. I'm pretty sure that no army in history has ever done so much to ensure aid to the enemy's side.

But here is how PCHR reports it:

The delay in the vaccination campaign due to Israel’s displacement orders highlights a trend of weaponizing previously eradicated, highly infectious diseases as a tool of genocide. This strategy deliberately uses such diseases to inflict permanent disability or death on Palestinian residents of Gaza.

This is simply a 21st  century update of the��Black Death blood libel against Jews. 

It isn't coming from neo-Nazis but from a respected human rights organization - one that partners with Amnesty and HRW, among others, and whose reports are trusted by those organizations as well as the UN.

To PCHR and other "human rights" NGOs, the idea that Israeli Jews are immoral, homicidal maniacs is the first principle from which these organizations interpret everything else. Once the idea that Jews are the worst people is established, then any counter-evidence becomes, instead, evidence of the  truth of their antisemitic conspiracy theories.

[puckpocketed]

Mackblack frustrated drag of his lobster claw along the ice… oh my sweet creature </3

[anapplinaday]

🏥 Egg Cream 🥚 // #113 Chansey

[chronal-anomaly]

Thinking about Lena being sick as a dog when they were doing her pre slipstream vaccination batteries

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joan Walsh at The Nation:

Roger Severino, a prominent attorney for the Christian right, led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights during the Trump administration. In 2017, The Atlantic called him “the man behind Trump’s religious-freedom agenda for health care.” The profile contrasted Severino’s sparsely decorated office—adorned with a crucifix and a Clarence Thomas bobblehead—with his elaborate domestic agenda. During Severino’s time there, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services weakened the Affordable Care Act; strengthened the ability of healthcare providers to claim religious exemptions from providing all kinds of medical care, from abortion to birth control to vasectomies to gender-affirming care; and created a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in his office. Under Severino’s legal counsel, HHS cut teen-pregnancy prevention programs and prioritized abstinence in its Title X family-planning grants. Backing Severino’s crusade was his boss, HHS secretary and former Eli Lilly president Alex Azar, best known for helping Trump botch his Covid response and presiding over his border policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Azar came to call his department “the Department of Life.”

In his chapter of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Severino promises to make HHS the “Department of Life” again—and to go even farther than Azar did. The plan outlines how HHS would use its power as a federal agency to dramatically curtail access to reproductive health services. Severino pledges that HHS will restrict access to birth control, rescind the FDA’s approval of medication abortion, and abolish what he calls “mail-order abortion”—the latter by using the long-dormant Comstock Act to prosecute anyone who provides such medication by mail. HHS will also focus on weeding out programs geared to the rights of LGBT people, especially anyone who is transgender. It would direct subsidies for childcare facilities to parents themselves—all in a punitive, misguided effort to shore up the nuclear family. This isn’t a public health document; it’s a theocratic manifesto, an attempt at ensuring public health through ultra-orthodox Christianity.

So much for “religious freedom.” Under “the next administration” (read: a Trump administration), Severino recommends that nearly every HHS program or agency—with special emphasis on the Administration for Children and Families, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Office of the Surgeon General—be retooled with the goal of promoting heterosexual marriage and procreation. He argues that the next president should use his powers to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Of course, he believes that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” He claims that “all other family forms” apart from “heterosexual, intact marriage…involve higher levels of instability.”

Severino attacks President Biden for “focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage”—while offering no examples of his policies that did any of the last three things. Severino calls on HHS to repeal antidiscrimination policy statements that identify sex with “gender identity or sexual orientation.” Here’s the crescendo: “Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures.”

Thus, HHS policies would “prioritize married father engagement” and stress the importance of heterosexual marriage in all of its health, education, and welfare programs, and it would even enable child-abuse prevention funds to be applied to marriage promotion efforts. The CDC would be directed to “eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation.”

The anti-abortion crusade, too, would continue throughout each of the department’s agencies: “HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care,” and the secretary should make sure that “all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death.” He or she would see to it that no funding whatsoever goes to abortion—not via Hyde Amendment exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother; not even via private insurance subsidized by the Affordable Care Act. Severino recommends eliminating the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and creating a “pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.”

Severino would force the FDA to “reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start. The FDA failed to abide by its legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of girls and women.” This argument is in front of the Supreme Court right now, and even some of the conservative justices don’t appear to be convinced by it. Severino promises that no Medicaid funding will go to Planned Parenthood. He also proposes reversing a Biden administration regulation that groups receiving Title X funds must be willing to “refer” women to abortion providers even if they don’t provide abortion themselves, thereby allowing “otherwise qualified pro-life grantees” to receive funding.

Severino also aims to restrict access to birth control, which many of us said would be the right’s next priority after banning abortion wherever possible. He announces that HHS must promote “public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness [fact check: This is widely disputed] of modern fertility awareness–based methods (FABMs) of family planning…. CDC should fund studies exploring the evidence-based methods used in cutting-edge fertility awareness.” Severino calls for HHS to prohibit women’s health facilities that receive Title X funding from distributing condoms. And by declaring that life begins at conception, his manifesto appears to commit HHS to finding ways to outlaw IVF, which relies on generating multiple embryos, most of which are not implanted. It could also eliminate birth control methods like the IUD and even some forms of the pill.

Severino reserves special vitriol for the CDC, which he derides as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” He wants to strip the CDC of its capacity to issue any kind of public health advice, because issuing such guidance is “an inescapably political function…. For example, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children ‘should be’ masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building,” his edict declaims. Instead, “a separate agency should be responsible for public health with a severely confined ability to make policy recommendations.” Severino’s critique of the CDC also shouts Christian fundamentalism, as he complains about the agency “shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020.” Yes, that was Easter 2020. “What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?” he asks. Severino wants to use the CDC’s data collection capacity to police abortion, especially those obtained by women forced to travel because of restrictions in their home state. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

[...] So that’s what HHS will do under Trump: Ban abortion. Police marriage. Force women to give birth, even if they don’t want to. Force women to marry men, and vice versa, even if they don’t want to. Privatize Medicare. Tighten restrictions on Medicaid. And if you feel like you’d rather not live this way? Severino wants to criminalize “euthanasia,” too.

Joan Walsh writes for The Nation that Project 2025 will turn the HHS into a tool for the far-right anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.

See Also:

The Nation: June 2024 Issue

[sspacegodd]

[familymd]

Protect yourself and others with our comprehensive COVID Testing and Vaccination services. We offer a range of diagnostic options, including rapid COVID-19 tests, antibody testing, and PCR testing. Stay informed about your COVID-19 status with accurate and reliable results.

[enlightningbugs]

Javits center vaccine line, 2021

[vampyroteuthid]

cannot fucking wait to get this new covid vaccine shoot me tf up ‼️‼️

[pochapal]

in the Horrors bonanza year that has been 2024 nobody expected the oldest and dearest Horrors of all (covid horrors) to make a third act comeback

[toshootforthestars]

From the report by Beth Mole, posted 29 Feb 2024:

In a lengthy background document, the agency laid out its rationale for consolidating COVID-19 guidance into general guidance for respiratory viruses—including influenza, RSV, adenoviruses, rhinoviruses, enteroviruses, and others, though specifically not measles. The agency also noted the guidance does not apply to health care settings and outbreak scenarios. "COVID-19 remains an important public health threat, but it is no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses, including influenza and RSV," the agency wrote. The most notable change in the new guidance is the previously reported decision to no longer recommend a minimum five-day isolation period for those infected with the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Instead, the new isolation guidance is based on symptoms, which matches long-standing isolation guidance for other respiratory viruses, including influenza. "The updated Respiratory Virus Guidance recommends people with respiratory virus symptoms that are not better explained by another cause stay home and away from others until at least 24 hours after both resolution of fever AND overall symptom are getting better," the document states. "This recommendation addresses the period of greatest infectiousness and highest viral load for most people, which is typically in the first few days of illness and when symptoms, including fever, are worst." The CDC acknowledged that the eased isolation guidance will create "residual risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission," and that most people are no longer infectious only after 8 to 10 days. As such, the agency urged people to follow additional interventions—including masking, testing, distancing, hygiene, and improving air quality—for five additional days after their isolation period. "Today’s announcement reflects the progress we have made in protecting against severe illness from COVID-19," CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen said in a statement. "However, we still must use the commonsense solutions we know work to protect ourselves and others from serious illness from respiratory viruses—this includes vaccination, treatment, and staying home when we get sick." Overall, the agency argued that a shorter isolation period would be inconsequential. Other countries and states that have similarly abandoned fixed isolation times did not see jumps in COVID-19 emergency department visits or hospitalizations, the CDC pointed out. And most people who have COVID-19 don't know they have it anyway, making COVID-19-specific guidance moot, the agency argued. In a recent CDC survey, less than half of people said they would test for SARS-CoV-2 if they had a cough or cold symptoms, and less than 10 percent said they would go to a pharmacy or health care provider to get tested. Meanwhile, "The overall sensitivity of COVID-19 antigen tests is relatively low and even lower in individuals with only mild symptoms," the agency said. The CDC also raised practical concerns for isolation, including a lack of paid sick leave for many, social isolation, and "societal costs." The points are likely to land poorly with critics. “The CDC is again prioritizing short-term business interests over our health by caving to employer pressure on COVID guidelines. This is a pattern we’ve seen throughout the pandemic,” Lara Jirmanus, Clinical Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in a press release last month after the news first broke of the CDC's planned isolation update. Jirmanus is a member of the People's CDC, a group that advocates for more aggressive COVID-19 policies, which put out the press release. Another member of the group, Sam Friedman, a professor of population health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, also blasted the CDC's stance last month. The guidance will "make workplaces and public spaces even more unsafe for everyone, particularly for people who are high-risk for COVID complications," he said.

But, the CDC argues that the threat of COVID-19 is fading. Hospitalizations, deaths, prevalence of long COVID, and COVID-19 complications in children (MIS-C) are all down. COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing severe disease, death, and to some extent, long COVID—we just need more people to get them. Over 95% of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 in the 2023–2024 respiratory season had no record of receiving the seasonal booster dose, the agency noted. Only 22% of adults got the latest shot, including only 42% of people ages 65 and older. In contrast, 48% of adults got the latest flu shot, including 73% of people ages 65 and older. But even with the crummy vaccination rates for COVID-19, a mix of past infection and shots have led to a substantial protection in the overall population. The CDC even went as far as arguing that COVID-19 deaths have fallen to a level that is similar to what's seen with flu. "Reported deaths involving COVID-19 are several-fold greater than those reported to involve influenza and RSV. However, influenza and likely RSV are often underreported as causes of death," the CDC said. In the 2022–2023 respiratory virus season, there were nearly 90,000 reported COVID-19 deaths. For flu, there were 9,559 reported deaths, but the CDC estimates the true number to be between 18,000 and 97,000. In the current season, there have been 32,949 reported COVID-19 deaths to date and 5,854 reported flu deaths, but the agency estimates the real flu deaths are between 17,000 and 50,000. "Total COVID-19 deaths, accounting for underreporting, are likely to be higher than, but of the same order of magnitude as, total influenza deaths," the agency concluded.

(say no to raw dough: CDC)

[makingshortstorieslong]

"new covid shot" has been on the to do list for an age and i've been failing to cross it off due to cowardice (terrifying ordeal of returning to the local health center) and lack of information (had no idea if they were giving out a new one around here) but i finally went down there today to get one and yes, they are available, but although the center is open until 6pm I apparently need to come back around 4 tomorrow. which means leaving work early but that's fine. i've been using my sick time much more liberally this year lol last year i barely touched it.

anyway. I was wondering

Have people been having side effects from the latest one? I genuinely don't remember if it was the first or second one that had me in bed with a fever all the next day, but I haven't had side effects other than that.

[panicinthestudio]

New report looks at the changing face of extremist groups in America, June 17, 2023

As hate groups edge toward the political mainstream, experts say they’re employing new tactics and taking on new forms. In June, the Southern Poverty Law Center added 12 conservative “parents’ rights” groups to its list of extremist and anti-government organizations. SPLC’s Susan Corke joins John Yang to discuss why the center added organizations like Moms for Liberty to their list. PBS NewsHour