Many thanks @maddow for hosting me tonight explaining how the Biden Admin has set forward a necessary and ambitious plan to vaccinate the American people, but why we must move up the time frame to provide 0.5 billion immunizations by late spring or early summer
The CDC now estimates UK 🇬🇧 variant will be widespread in March in the US, we’ll have Brazil 🇧🇷 South Africa 🇿🇦, homegrown variants. While cases going down now, this is just the eye of the hurricane. To prevent us from getting to 600,000 American 🇺🇸 lives lost we must accelerate
Our time table to 3 million immunizations per day. We won’t do that with the mRNA vaccines, in my @washingtonpost@PostOpinions article I indicated we need to get the AzOx vaccine up, we’ve purchased 300 million doses, if the EMA authorizes it for the EU on Friday, we must also
1/5: So my friends and colleagues arranged for me to zoom with my old professor @Yale I believe one of the first tenured African American full professors of basic medical sciences. The one with the baseball cap, now 85 born in the Deep South in 1934, went to @fisk1866
2/5: then @michiganstateu for his PhD and postdoc @RockefellerUniv maybe one of the first African American post docs there. His name is Prof. Curtis Patton he gave me my first job in science and taught me not only to be a scientist but to care about my colleagues and love them
3/5: we touched on many things today, but when we spoke about the insurrection, attack on the Capitol, Curtis spoke about the open display of racism and began to weep. We all followed, with the realization that as far as America 🇺🇸 has progressed, just scratch the surface...
Later this week I hope to publish a detailed statement highlighting the rise of strong Antiscience aggression in America, how it first amplified here in Texas, and its curious historical ties first to the Soviet Union and now Putin’s Russia nytimes.com/2021/01/24/wor…
It’s a complicated thread, but I hope it stimulates the beginnings of some type of response to the growing Antiscience forces now targeting scientists in the US. Until now, the major strategy has been to ignore it so as to avoid “giving it oxygen” but I feel we’re now beyond that
Combating Antiscience is not exactly what I planned on doing in this new decade, but throughout my career I’ve tried to focus my science policy to fill critical gaps: neglected diseases globally, diseases of poverty in US, R&D for NTDs, the antivaccine movement....and now this
I’ve made it very clear we don’t need vaccine mandates, and we don’t even have the vaccines for it. This is nothing more than dog whistles from antivaccine groups aligned with the far right. They will attempt to equate vaccine advocacy with fake “health freedom” violations
It’s one of the reasons I appreciated going on @newsmax yesterday to speak with @Tom_Basile. I was able to defuse immediately the vaccine mandates dog whistle. Will keep reaching out to conservative news outlets
As I point out about antivaccine groups: they don’t care about you or your family. They desperately seek relevancy, monetizing the internet. Aligning with far R political groups has worked for them for the last 5-6 years since 2015, now enabled by members of the US House Senate
1/5: This week the US will reach two terrible milestones: 25 million confirmed cases (which means about 100 million actual cases) and 400,000 lives lost (the number of American GIs sacrificing their lives in WWII) nytimes.com/interactive/20…
2/5: How did we get to this point? First, the deliberate decision by Trump White House + HHS agencies, especially CDC, to not put the US Federal Govt out in front, an insistence that the states must be in the lead. Even when it was obvious this strategy was failing they dug in
3/5: Second, as things began to fail in summer 2020 with the Southern surge, the WH embarked on an concerted Antiscience disinformation campaign that downplayed the epidemic, said it was the flu, attributed COVID19 deaths to other causes, discredited masks, spectacularized HC...
1/3: Unless we implement a national #COVID19 vaccination plan and strategy, by mid-late spring the number of #COVID19 deaths in America could reach 640,000, equivalent to Americans who died in the 1918 influenza pandemic
2/3: The plan must have at least 3 elements: 1) massive expansion in vaccine hubs, high throughput vaccinating 2 million Americans/d 2) liberalize unnecessary restrictions, make it easy 3) more vaccines, we won't get there with mRNA vaccines alone - we need the 3 additional types
3/3: We have no other choice: We've squandered every opportunity to contain this virus. This current administration left us with only a single arrow, and this time we cannot fail. It has to be our national priority.
I’m glad this happened here in #Houston. Given our national failures in containing COVID19 in 2020, our backs are against the wall: Vaccinating our way out is our last hope. For it to happen mass immunizations like this must become the new normal
Increasingly I hope we can pivot away from fussy and confusing 1b 1c restrictions and open up the nation to vaccinations. We won’t vaccinate the necessary 2-3 million Americans per day by dissecting lunch checks and asking who ordered the salad nicoise and who had the turkey club