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What to Know About Fall COVID Vaccines

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › fall-covid-vaccines-boosters › 675313

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Yesterday, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that everyone above the age of six months should get a dose of the new, updated COVID-19 vaccine that the FDA just green-lighted. To learn more about the vaccine, and for guidance on how to approach COVID as cases rise, I called Katherine J. Wu, an Atlantic staff writer who covers science.

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For Everyone

Lora Kelley: Why is the CDC recommending that everyone get a COVID vaccine this fall?

Katherine J. Wu: Experts at yesterday’s CDC advisory panel were really making it clear that everyone stands to benefit in some way from this vaccine. COVID is very much still a real threat. People are still dying, and people are still being debilitated by long COVID. Even if risk is not equal across everyone in the population, this is a really important public-health intervention.

It’s also important to keep in mind the historical and cultural context here. Last year, uptake for the fall COVID vaccine was abysmal; less than 20 percent of people got it even though it was also widely recommended. And certainly, with uptake that low, the goal will be to raise uptake this year.

Lora: How does this shot differ from previous COVID shots and boosters?

Katherine: I would argue that this is not a booster. This is another move toward routinizing COVID-19 vaccines to be like the annual flu vaccine, a shot that is given to much of the population every fall in advance of respiratory-virus season. With the flu vaccine, there’s an expectation that the composition of the vaccine is going to change with some regularity: The main variants or strains the vaccines are targeting may change.

This COVID shot is different from last year’s: It no longer contains any ingredients targeting the original coronavirus variants that were in the very first vaccines that we got in 2020 and 2021. It targets just the XBB subvariants of Omicron.

Lora: In your article today, you wrote about an expert who believes vaccine recommendations should prioritize only vulnerable groups. What is motivating some experts not to offer full-throated endorsements of everyone getting a vaccine this fall?

Katherine: To be clear, there is really widespread consensus that everyone needs at least a couple doses of the vaccine. There’s no doubt in experts’ minds that going from zero vaccines to two or three is essential. The gains are going to be massive for everyone.

The disagreement here is not necessarily about the facts—it’s more about how they should be framed. There’s widespread consensus that certain groups are at higher risk than others, including people who are older, immunocompromised, pregnant, living with chronic health conditions, and living in congregate settings, to name a few. The question then is: Should we target the recommendations only to these groups, to really make sure that they are the ones going out to get this vaccine with no hesitation?

There is worry among some experts that the universal recommendation does not adequately focus vaccination efforts on the people who most need it. And some experts feel that young, healthy people, who are at a lower risk of bad COVID outcomes, may be set with the vaccines that they’ve already got.

Lora: How would you recommend that people who aren’t in those high-risk categories approach vaccines this fall?

Katherine: I am all for enthusiastically recommending this vaccine to everyone. Some people are at higher risk, so I would even more strongly encourage those people to go get it.

When we think about any vaccine, especially COVID-19 vaccines, we think most about preventing severe disease. But there are secondary benefits of these vaccines too: For at least a time, you will have a lower risk of getting infected and spreading the virus. And if you do get sick, your symptoms may be shorter if you’ve been recently vaccinated. There may even be a lower risk of developing long COVID down the road, which is an important thing to keep in mind because we know that it can come out of even mild infections. Also, there’s really not a concern at this point of the vaccine running out.

Lora: When should people get this vaccine?

Katherine: There are a few things to keep in mind on timing: If you are lower risk, there is relatively less rush to get the shot. That said, COVID cases have been rising for weeks now. So I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone to not get a shot anytime soon.

The one exception is if you’ve recently been infected. If you have had COVID recently: First, I’m sorry. Second, there are a lot of immunologists who would argue it’s not a terrible idea to wait maybe two or three months after your infection before getting a shot, because you probably have some lingering immunity left behind from that infection. (Huge caveat here: This is not an endorsement of infection, but just a matter of fact.) You don’t want to hamper the ability of your body to form a good immune response to the vaccine if you get it too close to infection.

You totally can get the COVID shot at the same time as the flu shot. It’s convenient, and you only have to deal with possible side effects once.

Lora: What precautions can people take this fall, beyond just getting vaccinated?

Katherine: I am definitely getting a vaccine this fall. But a vaccine is not a silver bullet. It’s going to work best against severe disease, but the protections against infection and transmission are more porous and more temporary. So when I go into crowded settings, when I travel on planes, when I see people in my life who are more vulnerable than I am, I am going to be testing and masking.

We’ve already seen that cases have been rising even at the tail end of summer, which is atypical for most respiratory viruses. That’s another reminder that COVID has not yet settled into a super predictable pattern. I don’t want to hide in my house forever. I want to be able to enjoy the company of others. But I see vaccines, testing, and masking as tools that enable me to interact more safely in those settings.

Evening Read

Didier Viodé

I Never Called Her Momma

By Jenisha Watts

Ms. Brown didn’t tell me where we were going. I knew we would be visiting someone important, a literary figure, because we took a gypsy cab instead of the subway. It would probably be someone I should have known, but didn’t.

A brownstone in Harlem. It was immaculate—paintings of women in headscarves; a cherry-colored oriental rug; a dark, gleaming dining-room table. Ms. Brown led me toward a woman on the couch. She knew that I would recognize her, and I did, despite the plastic tube snaking from her nostrils to an oxygen tank. Maya Angelou’s back was straight. Her rose-pink eyeshadow sparkled.

My mind called up random bits of information from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Canned pineapples—she loved them. Bailey—her brother’s name. What she felt when she heard someone read Dickens aloud for the first time—the voice that “slid in and curved down through and over the words.” And that, like me, she had called her grandmother Momma.

Read our October cover story.

The Only Way to Stop Trump

found Sep '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › trump-2024-fourteenth-amendment-colorado-lawsuit › 675297

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Eminent legal scholars think the Constitution makes Donald Trump ineligible for office; critics of the idea worry that using the Fourteenth Amendment will create an uncontrollable political weapon.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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A Constitutional Dilemma

For weeks, legal scholars and public intellectuals have been debating whether Donald Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run for president again. Six voters in Colorado filed a lawsuit last week that will test this theory. If you’re confused, or uncertain whether this is a good idea, join the club: I change my mind about it roughly once every 12 hours.

Let’s review some basic civics. Here’s Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1866:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

At the time, the section’s intention was to prevent the secessionists of the Civil War from walking right back into power in the states where they’d just been defeated. Confederate states were required to ratify this amendment as a condition for regaining representation in the American legislature, and it was finally ratified in the summer of 1868.

Two of America’s great legal minds, the retired conservative federal judge Michael Luttig and the liberal law professor Laurence Tribe, have argued that Section 3 automatically renders Trump ineligible for office. “The clause,” they wrote in The Atlantic last month, “was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.”

January 6 was a violent attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, for which many people have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Many more have gone to prison for their actions at the Capitol that day. And they were all there at the urging of Donald Trump, who is now under criminal indictment for multiple felonies stemming from this attempt to subvert American democracy.

I am convinced by this reasoning. Case closed. Take Trump’s name off the ballots.

Well … not so fast. My friend and colleague David Frum believes that all of this talk about using the Fourteenth Amendment is “a fantasy.” David’s argument is that the amendment is, if not an anachronism, a peculiar part of our Constitution whose meaning was clear in 1866 but whose relevance has passed. He warns us not to think of Section 3 as a quick and easy “cheat code” that can obviate Trump’s renomination.

David raises some important practical questions. For one thing, who will make the determination that January 6 was “an insurrection or rebellion”? I think it was, but until things change in this country, The Tom Nichols Institute of Constitutional Adjudication has no power to make its very sensible rulings stick as a matter of law. (Also, I should perhaps point out that Trump has pleaded not guilty in all four indictments.)

Luttig and Tribe assert that Section 3 does not explicitly require such convictions or determinations, but that’s because in 1866 the “rebellion” was obviously the Civil War and the Union Army, as the local authority in the rebellious states, made the on-site determination of who could run for office. David’s correct to predict that invalidating Trump’s candidacy based on “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection” would plunge the country into eternal litigation about what, exactly, all those words mean.

Likewise, how would Trump actually be removed from the election? There is no single national “ballot”; Democratic secretaries of state would have to strike his name from their state ballots, after which Joe Biden would win the Electoral College. But as David writes, Biden would only be “kind of” reelected, in a result that nearly half the country would view as illegitimate. “The rage and chaos that would follow,” he warns, “are beyond imagining.”

David makes a political point that is also worth at least some concern. “If Section 3 can be reactivated in this way, then reactivated it will be. Republicans will hunt for Democrats to disqualify, and not only for president, but for any race where Democrats present someone who said or did something that can be represented as ‘aid and comfort’ to enemies of the United States.”

Lest anyone think Republicans would have enough sense to forgo weaponizing important parts of the U.S. Constitution merely for trollish political theater, let us note that as of this morning, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has ordered up an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. This effort will likely backfire on Republicans (if it even gets out of committee), as would attempts to remove Democrats from ballots on a Section 3 objection. But clogging the courts with inane Republican lawsuits would be another deep bruise on the American constitutional system of government.

What a killjoy. Because after reviewing his arguments, I now agree with David.

By temperament, I was overall more inclined to agree with David’s prudential arguments anyway. But Luttig and Tribe make a simple and forceful point that still sticks in my teeth: The Constitution says what it says, and it doesn’t stop saying it just because enforcing it would be hard to do or because bad actors will use it for political mischief.

Indeed, fidelity to the Constitution should be the core of principled opposition to Donald Trump’s continued presence in our public life. Of course, he’s unfit for office for many reasons; he’s vulgar and ignorant and narcissistic, but so are many other people who have made their way into elected office. The singular danger that unites so many of Trump’s opponents, however, is that he has shown himself to be an avowed enemy of democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution of the United States. How can we flinch now?

And yet I, too, am hesitant to open a legal Pandora’s box. It might not be constitutionally pure to worry about things such as protracted lawsuits and cheap Republican stunts, but the nature of our current political troubles demands a decisive and final answer to Trump’s attempts to destroy the Constitution, and here David makes the strongest of all possible points: The only sure way to stop Trump is with a resounding and undeniable defeat at the ballot box.

Today’s News

Five former Memphis police officers have been indicted on federal criminal charges in connection with Tyre Nichols’s death. At least 5,000 people are dead and thousands more are believed to be missing after severe flooding and dam collapses in Libya. The United States and Iran are moving forward with a prisoner-swap deal. Five American citizens will be released in exchange for five Iranian citizens and the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf compiles reader perspectives on whether racial “color-blindness” is possible.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Vartika Sharma. Sources: Steve Pyke / Getty; Harry Borden / Contour by Getty.

From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist

By Helen Lewis

In 2019, a mnemonic began to circulate on the internet: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.” The rhyme recognized one of the most puzzling intellectual journeys of recent times—Naomi Wolf’s descent into conspiracism—and the collateral damage it was inflicting on the Canadian climate activist and anti-capitalist Naomi Klein.

Until recently, Naomi Wolf was best known for her 1990s feminist blockbuster The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that the tyranny of grooming standards—all that plucking and waxing—was a form of backlash against women’s rights. But she is now one of America’s most prolific conspiracy theorists, boasting on her Twitter profile of being “deplatformed 7 times and still right.” She has claimed that vaccines are a “software platform” that can “receive ‘uploads’ ” and is mildly obsessed with the idea that many clouds aren’t real, but are instead evidence of “geoengineered skies.” Although Wolf has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, she is now a favored guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room.

All of this is particularly bad news for Klein, for the simple reason that people keep mistaking the two women for each other.

Read the full article.