Despite the media coverage, Phil Valentine didn't believe COVID-19 was serious as long as you were healthy: "He said, 'The likelihood of me getting it is low. "Before I knew it, he was in there and I couldn't get to him, couldn't talk to him," Valentine recalls. Health officials say a 13-year-old from Saginaw County - located in central Michigan - died in his sleep in mid-June, three days after his second dose, according to the Detroit Free Press. A lot of money and energy was invested in the logistics of the rollout the supply side of the equation. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. He. David Dee Delgado/Getty Images analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Come on! some might say. Some counties that have reported no COVID-19 deaths since May 1 may have stopped reporting. Vaccination rate data are the rate of vaccination among all people 18 years of age or older, as of Nov. 30. Earlier this year, he contracted the virus and died. Its not surprising then that when a prominent person who has refused to perform this act of love particularly when that person has railed publicly against these health-saving measures dies from Covid, some people are eager to say, I told you so. A few go further, mocking those who have died or even trolling their survivors. Three of the headlines involve deaths in Portugal, Brazil and Norway; the other six involve two health workers in California, a Florida doctor, a Virginia woman in her 40s and New York man in his 70s. There have been more than 1,000 reports since April of inflammation of the heart called myocarditis and pericarditis after mRNA vaccinations such as the Pfizer and Moderna shots, the CDC said. A New York resident died on Sunday morning shortly after receiving the COVID vaccine, but state health officials maintain that "the vaccine is safe," the New York Post . Mr. Hiatt resisted the label of neoconservative, however, and defended his stance by saying that The Post had always favored a strong defense and an America that is prudently engaged in the world.. Then the Online Attacks Started. She has decided to preserve samples of her husbands tissue for future testing, hoping to unlock a mystery as more data about the vaccines emerge in years to come. is forcing doctors to choose between treating sick patients or breaking federal law. The unnamed New York City man died on Feb. 7 after collapsing outside of Manhattan's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where he received his vaccine 25 minutes earlier, the New York Post reported. An elderly man collapsed and died in Manhattan on Sunday morning shortly after receiving a COVID-19 vaccination at the Javits Center, a health official said. The saddest part is that it simply didnt have to be that way. Orange County Coroner's office, Feb. 22, Email. Hawaii is excluded because it does not report county-level vaccine data. May I offer a counterargument? We've received your submission. The long-awaited autopsy report, released Wednesday July 14, found that Zooks heart was severely enlarged, thicker than normal and dilated. Pfizer told the Times it was "actively investigating" the doctor's death"but we don't believe at this time that there is any direct connection to the vaccine.". Clinical examination and lab results have determined the COVID-19 vaccine has been ruled out as a contributing factor in the individual's death. Reached by phone, the commenter said she stood by her online sentiments. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. Dec. 6, 2021 Fred Hiatt, the longtime editorial page editor of The Washington Post, who used his position atop one of the nation's most visible and influential opinion platforms to support. USA TODAY wasunable to reach the Instagram user for further comment. Mr. Hiatt, a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing, led The Posts opinion section for more than two decades. "I'm trying to say: 'The anti-science doesn't belong; it doesn't fit. When Jesus was crucified alongside two thieves, he says to one of them, according to Lukes Gospel, not Thats what you get, but Today you will be with me in paradise. Schadenfreude is not a Christian value. Nicole mailed him gloves and masks. Biden ends COVID vaccine mandates for feds, international flyers, Public Health Inc. out to slow the spread of truth of its betrayal, Texas AGs COVID-19 vax investigation could stick it to Big Pharma execs. Colin Wayne Leach, a psychology professor at Barnard College who has studied schadenfreude and gloating, told The New York Times recently that the schadenfreude many feel in response to the. I say live free, the man wrote. Recent polling shows that partisanship is now this single strongest identifying predictor of whether someone is vaccinated. 22 Nov 2018. In October, the reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth, according to Charles Gaba, an independent health care analyst who's been tracking partisanship trends during the pandemic and helped to review NPR's methodology. I was right. After months of trying to convince anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and anti-social distancers that lifesaving measures are both for their own good and for that of others, frustration might get the better of people. We have all been affected by the sheer volume of death and misery this virus has created. County population data come from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 decennial census. The national number of vaccine-preventable COVID deaths calculated by Brown and Microsoft exceeds an earlier analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which put that number at 234,000. Zook, 60, died after receiving his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. The details of Mr. Bledsoes death and desperation-fueled change of heart stayed largely confined to his Facebook page. So relief may be felt when a source of that fear is removed. My personal fury is directed at political figures who have negatively contributed to the situation through their disingenuous rhetoric, espoused for their personal political benefit. Those numbers have dropped slightly in recent weeks, Gaba says: "It's back down to around 5.5 times higher.". That demand dropped off by summer. African Americans, younger Americans and rural Americans all had significant portions of their demographic that resisted vaccination. That is, until they appeared in screen-shotted detail the following week on a website that compiles the coronavirus deaths of vocal vaccine opponents. Phil Valentine died in August about five weeks after he announced he had tested positive for COVID-19. One tragic fact about the nearly 1 million people who died of COVID-19 in the U.S. is that a huge share of them didn't have to. NPR looked at deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which vaccinations widely became available. Three ofthe nine headlines in the Instagram post refer to deaths inOrange and Placercountiesin California. Its cruel. ''. Watchdogs need help: Point us to documents that can help tell stories that need to be told, and we'll do the rest. He hired a wonderful staff, he was greatly admired by some pretty picky writers, and he was always willing to listen, Mr. Graham said. I will not give a damn whether or not they suffer for their choice. I am fully vaccinated, including booster, and I was recently infected with Omicron along with my 80-year-old father. Other medical experts also agree that the COVID vaccine is safe for vaccination. Given the level of resistance to vaccines even at this late hour in the battle against Covid, perhaps thats the best response I have to offer to my good colleagues probing question. The consequences for individuals are real. On Jan. 4, the British Daily Mail reported 41-year-old Portuguese health worker Sonia Acevedo had died on Jan. 1, "two days after getting the Pfizer covid vaccine." By Aug. 31, Mr. Scott was hospitalized with Covid pneumonia, said his wife, who was also infected but posted frequent Facebook updates on his ordeal, from oxygen mask to the I.C.U. I have zero empathy for anyone who willfully puts me or my family at risk. The man, in his 70s, fell as he . The official cause of death was hypertensive and atherosclerotic heart disease with severe cardiomegaly and heart failure, the report says. "Preliminary findings indicate that the cause of death was not anaphylaxis, but it will take several weeks for additional information to become available," he said in a statement on Feb. 5. The design of social media platforms amplifies moral outrage and triggers the brains reward centers through punishment and shaming, particularly shaming that is motivated by schadenfreude, according to Molly Crockett, a psychologist at Yale University. It worked out so well that the newspaper moved them to a similar job-sharing beat in Moscow, where they covered the fall of the Soviet Union. "These medical events occur every single day, including unexplained illnesses," said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, also to ABC News. He began to feel ill a few hours later, and died on Jan. 9. Conservative talk radio host Phil Valentine (right), pictured with his brother, Mark (second from left). "Folks started to have a conversation within their social networks, and had a real attitude of, 'Well, someone else has been vaccinated, I don't need to be vaccinated.' Sign up and stay up to date with our daily newsletter. Feeling vindicated by someones death seems immoral, but it also seems reflexive. USA TODAY used Google Translate and other translation services to interpret Portuguese into English. In 2016, before the general election was underway and long before Mr. Trump was twice impeached, Mr. Hiatt wrote that Mr. Trumps contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nations two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew. He was a Pulitzer finalist for his editorials about Mr. Trump. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. All through the pandemic I have struggled between hoping, on the one hand, that something will happen to those people and, conversely, what I think should be my Christian reaction: to forgive them and to hope and pray for their health, souls and enlightenment. I urge you all to research the Tuskegee experiment if you haven't already," another wrote. What has saved me from myself is the simple prayer that such misguided souls loved ones and friends be moved to be vaccinated themselves. officials limit treatments that dont work on Omicron, but doctors say alternatives are scarce (Coronavirus updates, nytimes.com, Jan. 24): The Food and Drug Administration demonstrated both its distrust of doctors and zeal for harmful federal regulations by unauthorizing two Covid-19 monoclonal antibody treatments safely used in the United States for over a year, saving countless lives, because of their reduced efficacy against Omicron. Anyone can read what you share. Newcastle coroner Karen Dilks heard Ms Shaw suffered blood clots in the brain which . Obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Gregory Michael died from complications of immune thrombocytopenia, or ITP poor blood clotting due to a lack of platelets in early January. She was just a beautiful person, WWJ reporter Vickie Thomas told the news outlet. All rights reserved. And in a hyperpartisan culture plagued by alternative facts and debates over the most basic scientific realities of the pandemic, many among the vaccinated are eager to brandish such accounts as the final, indubitable proof that the Covid deniers and those who are anti-vaccine are dangerously misguided. One of the nine headlines is a Jan. 15 article published in the New York Post that detailsthe deaths of 23 people in Norway all over age 75 and 13 of whom were nursing home residents within a week of vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine. Many of the post's comments echo the sentiment, likening the vaccine to the infamously unethical Tuskegee syphilis study on Black men, which falsely advertised treatment for "bad blood," a term commonly used for a garden variety of ailments. To the Editor: The Rev. Anyone can read what you share. Additionally, Florida's counties were removed from the analysis after publication because we learned that Florida has not updated county-level death numbers since June 3. That is the sweetest justice, and thats partly why its so satisfying to the other side.. A senior White House official speaking with NPR on background pointed to work the administration has done to invest in community-led vaccination efforts, and said that trust-building was a key part of what the Biden administration is asking Congress to fund. It lessens our compassion. "We underestimated dramatically the investment it would take to get people familiarized with vaccines because, by and large, we haven't had a deadly disease like this, so people have become estranged from the important impact of vaccination.". As a thought experiment, imagine that a man playing Russian roulette shoots himself in the head. Many of these people were not only in denial about vaccines, but also refused to believe they were suffering from Covid until they took their last breath. Much less was invested in encouraging vaccine demand, she says. Most patients who received care responded well to treatment and rest and quickly felt better, the CDC said. The X-ray technologist who died four days after his second COVID-19 shot was felled by heart disease, the Orange County Coroner has concluded. He had been visiting his daughter in Brooklyn on Nov. 24 and was out shopping for the familys Thanksgiving dinner when he went into sudden cardiac arrest, said his wife, Margaret Shapiro, who is known as Pooh. Political affiliation is now the strongest indicator of whether someone is vaccinated, she says: "If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is.". It provides evidence and incentive, she adds, to try and support more people in the decision to get vaccinated. According to the analysis, West Virginia, Wyoming, Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma had the most vaccine-preventable deaths per capita. The cruel sentiments have migrated offline as well, manifested in things like gravestone lawn ornaments engraved with the phrase I did my own research, images of which were shared widely on social media before Halloween. Ms. Scott said she feels like her husband sacrificed himself so the rest of their family could stay safe, noting that their 19-year-old daughter got her first shot not long after he died. People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.73 times the death rates of those that went for Biden. And everyone was praying (or hoping) for a vaccine. Thats what you get, Og!, Colin Wayne Leach, a psychology professor at Barnard College who has studied schadenfreude and gloating, told The New York Times recently that the schadenfreude many feel in response to the death of anti-vaccine activists is an outgrowth of the countrys polarization: In many ways, its seeing your enemies suffer because of what they believe.