It doesn't seem to matter how many stories like this get published; the deniers dismiss them and listen to their 'trusted' scam artists. However, here is that Oregonian story, in full:
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Fedor Zarkhin - The Oregonian/OregonLive
In southern Oregon, hard hit by the delta wave, families reckon with loss
Justin Comer wasn’t scared of COVID‑19, until he was.
“Get a vaccine or don’t, I don’t care,” the 32-year-old Roseburg sawmill worker wrote on Facebook in December. “But it’s when people try to tell me what to do that it becomes an issue. We will all get COVID at some point.”
The woman who became his wife that June, Darian Comer, agreed. Both dismissed masking and repeatedly pointed out what they saw as contradictions in public health requirements. Both thought there hasn’t been enough time to see if the vaccine is safe long-term, Darian Comer said.
Nowhere has the state been hit harder during the COVID-19 delta wave than southern Oregon, even as widely available vaccines decrease the death toll in more urban parts of the state.
As vaccines have become widely available, Portland area counties have seen a steady decline in COVID-19 deaths. Portland area residents accounted for about 19% of all COVID-19 deaths in Oregon since July, compared to about 40% of all deaths before the delta wave.
The rural counties of Douglas, Jackson and Josephine counties have seen the opposite. The counties accounted for 27% of all COVID-19 deaths since the delta wave began — nearly three times their share of the population — up from 11% of all COVID-19 deaths through July of this year.
Yet as state and local health officials have worked tirelessly to promote COVID‑19 vaccines, their messages have, in many cases, been ineffective. Mandates have tightened and deadlines have come and gone. With full federal approval, vaccine hesitancy gave way to vaccine resistance in many of Oregon’s rural counties.
The Oregonian/OregonLive sought to shed new light on the decision at the heart of a bitter political divide. We spoke in-depth with families of four people in Douglas and Jackson counties who have lost — or nearly lost — loved ones to COVID-19 and found that for some, even a brush with death isn’t enough to convince a skeptic that vaccines are worth it.
About eight months after writing his Facebook comment in January, Comer and his wife both got COVID-19. He did not survive, dying in an Oregon Health & Science University intensive care unit bed on Oct. 6.
And yet Comer’s wife sees the COVID-19 vaccine much the same as she did before her husband got sick and died, even as nearly 2.9 million Oregonians have gotten vaccinated against the disease.
“If it really worked, people would be lining up to get it,” the 27-year-old Roseburg native said of the COVID-19 vaccine. “You know, nobody wants to get sick. Nobody wants their family members to die.”
HESITATION REMAINS
Southern Oregon has among the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates in the state and the highest case and death rates since the delta wave came to Oregon over the summer.
Public health officials have long connected COVID‑19 case rates to attitudes towards the disease, especially whether people get shots and follow basic measures like wearing masks.
A key part of public health officials’ battle with COVID‑19 remains public perception. Convince people the disease is dangerous, perhaps more of them will mask up and cases will be lower. Answer people’s questions about the vaccine, perhaps more will decide to get a shot.
In Oregon, as in the rest of the country, that kind of public health messaging has had limited effect, especially after pandemic restrictions became more a symbol of tyranny for the political right than a health measure to save lives. As vitriol grew on both sides of the political spectrum, Oregonians found it harder to decide who to trust.
The COVID-19 vaccine is a touchy subject in Douglas County, so much so that Roseburg resident Diana Gwaltney had to all but corner her husband on a drive to the coast to talk to about it.
As they made their way west down Oregon 38 that August weekend, Gwaltney overcame her own fears about the vaccine and explained why she thought they should get vaccinated: If either of them was hospitalized with COVID-19, the family of three could face financial ruin.
Before the delta wave, both Gwaltneys were on the same page about not getting vaccinated. Then, come around June, people in the grocery store where she works started getting sick, some much more so than others. That’s when she started to see COVID-19 and the vaccine differently.
After hearing her out, 37-year-old Caleb Gwaltney was on board.
“He said that he agreed,” Diana Gwaltney, 52, said, “and that’s when we knew that we were going to do it.”
But, neither of them, in reality, was fully convinced. And, she said, she let life get in the way, until it was too late.
“We just didn’t do it. I mean, that was the last conversation we had about it,” she said. “Before we got sick.”
HOSPITALIZED FOR MONTHS
Diana and Caleb Gwaltney don’t know for sure how they got COVID-19, but they think it was at a dinner with a friend a few weeks later. Everyone hugged, no one wore masks. The day after the gathering, the friend said she tested positive for COVID-19. Then, Diana and Caleb did, too.
Caleb Gwaltney barely survived that COVID-19 infection. He spent nearly three weeks on a ventilator at Oregon Health & Science University. Doctors at one point told his wife to “have that conversation” with the rest of the family about him possibly dying.
And while he is now conscious and, by all accounts, out of the woods, the post-infection ordeal could last his life. Just last week, doctors said he might never be able to use his right foot again because the muscles in it had atrophied while he was hospitalized.
But while she counts herself lucky, Diana Gwaltney seems on the verge of tears when talking about their ordeal.
Their 10-year-old son saw his father in November for the first time since he was hospitalized.
Gwaltney ran a barbecue cart in Roseburg and she is a manager at a Southern Oregon grocery store chain. With the food truck and barbecue smokers parked outside their house, half of their income is gone, Gwaltney said. She doesn’t know how they’ll pay the bills.
But as the family starts to come out the other end of their COVID-19 ordeal, they remain in a community that appears unaffected by what she has gone through.
While she is adamant that her family could have been spared the trauma had Caleb Gwaltney been vaccinated, their experience is not enough for acquaintances to take COVID-19 seriously, let alone consider getting the vaccine that could prevent it.
A work friend was so sick that she told Gwaltney she could barely stand up without passing out, Gwaltney recalled. But she refused to get tested for COVID-19 or go to a doctor because “she didn’t want to be a statistic,” Gwaltney said.
“You know Caleb is fighting for his life,” Gwaltney said to her friend. “And you want to deny this in your mind? Because you just don’t want to believe in COVID?”
Yet Diana Gwaltney remains unvaccinated. She insists she will get the shots soon, she said, and her son is now all but begging to get a shot.
“It’s just my own fear of the unknown that keeps me, honestly, at this point, from going and getting it,” Gwaltney said. “But I’m going to do it.”
RECOGNITION, TOO LATE
The pot of beef, barley and vegetable soup simmered on the stove, filling the Oakland home with the kind of smell Kyle Brown would come to most days of the week, before the 43-year-old contracted COVID-19 and died.
For months, Brown’s parents tried to convince him to get vaccinated. He refused, however, telling his mother that not enough was known about the long-term effects of the vaccine. Conversations over dinner would get testy.
His mother, Diane Brown, would get frustrated. “It’s about your health,” Brown said. “It’s not political.”
He lived just a few blocks away in the town north of Roseburg and had dinner with them every night, after finishing up with work in a garage, where he would build “turbo-chargers” for racing truck engines and ship them off to clients around the country, Brown said.
When he was hospitalized with COVID-19 in August because he could barely breathe, Brown’s father texted him to say it would have been good if he had gotten vaccinated earlier. Brown replied that he had, in fact, gotten a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine the previous month. He just didn’t tell anyone.
But the dose was not enough. After 19 days on a ventilator at Mercy Medical Center, Brown died — one of about 300 breakthrough deaths in Oregon and one of only 10 Oregonians under 50 to die of COVID-19 despite being vaccinated. He had an underlying heart condition that was only discovered at the hospital, Diane Brown said.
The Browns put a miniature replica Model S Tesla on top of Kyle Brown’s urn to honor their son, who had wanted to purchase the electrical vehicle “just to see what makes it tick.”
CHANGING MINDS
The day she announced on Facebook she was pregnant with twins, Libby McDowell, 36, also announced her husband needed help fighting COVID-19.
“This is not how I planned on doing this, but I am currently pregnant,” McDowell wrote Aug. 5. “I cannot do this without him. I need him, I can’t live without him.”
Her husband, Jamie McDowell, was in the Asante Ashland Community Hospital, fighting a severe infection.
The first time Libby McDowell visited her husband after he was hospitalized, they both tried to joke about the situation.
“How did you get in here?” he asked.
“Ain’t no mountain tall enough,” she sang, as he laughed. “Ain’t no river wide enough.”
“They’re turning me into a cyborg,” Jamie McDowell said, pointing the tubes and wires attached to his body.
But then he got serious for a minute, telling his wife he wished he had gotten the COVID-19 vaccine.
“He said he knew he had made a mistake in not getting vaccinated and that he would get vaccinated as soon as they said that he could,” Libby McDowell said.
But even though doctors initially assured her Jamie would be out of the hospital soon, he was not. The 46-year-old stayed on a ventilator for 20 days.
One day, a nurse told McDowell that if anyone was going to make it out of that intensive care unit alive, it would be her husband.
“That was a day or two before he died,” McDowell said. “It still feels really weird to say those words.”
Staff were planning to have him breathe with less assistance from the ventilator. But he became anxious, so they sedated him more fully, this time using a paralytic they hadn’t given him before. The man had a rare reaction to the chemical that stopped his heart, McDowell said nurses told her.
Sitting in the ICU hall, McDowell looked up and saw staff pumping at his chest, trying to bring him back to life. His parents and adult daughters came to the hospital and, about 40 minutes after staff started to try to save his life, it was over.
‘If he had been vaccinated ...’
Even as she grieves, McDowell is finding ways to blame herself for her husband’s death.
“I think about it constantly,” McDowell said. “I think that if he had been vaccinated, he probably would still be here.”
Libby McDowell said she never got vaccinated because she had only seen data showing it was safe when a pregnant woman is in her third trimester. After having a miscarriage earlier this year, she wasn’t going to take any risks. Jamie McDowell, meanwhile, didn’t want to get vaccinated because he was worried about long-term side effects.
“I didn’t push it too much. I wish now that I had,” McDowell said. “But I was also scared. What if he had a reaction?”
Now, McDowell hopes that her husband’s death could make a difference by inspiring others to get vaccinated. Multiple family members and friends have already told her they got shots because of what happened to Jamie.
Her brother, Alex Garecht, had similar reasons for not getting vaccinated as his brother-in-law: He didn’t like people telling him what to do. And he had figured he was young and strong.
But soon after Jamie was hospitalized, Libby starting posting on Facebook about what he was going through. As Garecht read the posts, he decided he had to do what he could to save his sister from going through that with another family member.
“I’ve always just thought, I’m young, I’m healthy — nothing to worry about,” Garecht said. “Jamie showed us different.”
Libby McDowell’s life has been devastated. With twins due in January, the first-time mother moved to Iowa after her husband’s death to live with her mother, who will help raise the children.
McDowell cries as she describes the kind of father she knows Jamie would have been for their daughters. She cries as she says that she will try to be all of that for them.
“I feel like I lost everything,” McDowell said. “I still, sometimes, I just can’t believe that this really happened.”
fzark✧✧✧@oregon✧✧✧.c✧✧
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 22 November 2021 04:48 (two years ago) link
The Unvaxxed Lefties Hiding In Plain Sight
The first time David lied about being vaccinated against COVID-19 was during his shift at an ice-cream shop in L.A. A few months ago, a co-worker asked if he’d gotten the shot, and the 24-year-old paused for a split second before saying “Yes.” The fib felt unnatural coming out of his mouth, but he was more worried about people assuming he was a Facebook-meme-believing, Trump-loving Republican, when he felt nothing could be further from the truth. David, who requested a pseudonym, is a “pretty radical leftist” who wrote in Bernie Sanders on the ballot last November and says he believes in “science and medicine.” But he’s also skeptical about a vaccine he feels Big Pharma rushed to the market. Why be a guinea pig? He’s not “anti-vaxx,” just anti-COVID vaxx, though his fellow lefties seem unable to separate his “genuine concerns about taking an experimental vaccine with widespread side effects from the more crazy conspiracy fears about nanobots and the rapture.” So the recent UCLA grad keeps these thoughts to himself, or posts them anonymously on Reddit and lies to friends and family. David decided that having “people make assumptions about your character or your intelligence” felt worse than just pretending to “be what they want you to be.”During the pandemic, the prototypical anti-vaxxer emerged as a maskless conservative who prays to the altar of individual liberty and fears microchips being injected into their veins. And while the largest piece of the unvaccinated pie is certainly red, there’s a little slice of lefties just like David, whose skepticism of the jab is rivaled only by their rejection of right-wing stereotypes. These vaxx-less intelligentsia sit to the left of Democrats, somewhere on the spectrum near holistic mommies who swear by herbal remedies and New York’s downtown kids who infamously partied through the pandemic, scolds be damned. They are part of the 10 percent of Americans who’ve adopted a “wait and see” attitude toward the vaccine, more likely to hold progressive beliefs and approach the shot with raised eyebrows than middle fingers.
I started noticing them a few months ago on social media, where a handful of former classmates from my liberal-arts college were bad-mouthing Pfizer and Moderna. While some were posting from the rabbit hole, others mused about the need for critical thinking, open dialogue, and a close reading of scientific studies. These talking points seemed more ripped from our philosophy seminars than any Republican playbook, and were cushioned with caveats (“This is just for me, over here in my body in my demographic and specific living situation, for the time being”). Besides, they weren’t being reckless! They mask up and get tested, and some are fairly isolated. Similar arguments were recently made by unvaxxed Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers: “I’m not some sort of anti-vaxx flat-earther. I’m somebody who’s a critical thinker,” he told a radio host. “I just wanted to make the best choice for my body.” (Though we don’t know Rodgers’s politics, he has a history of supporting progressive causes, like racial equality and legal aid.) This shade of the anti-vaxx movement is just asking fellow leftists to keep an open mind, same as they would while discussing Plato on a grassy campus lawn. But often, their philosophical, anti-Establishment critiques are a way to justify personal fears — fears many have worked hard to hide.
Vaxx-hesitant progressives say they are under attack. Over and over again, they told me about feeling like outcasts in their lefty circles (for this reason, almost all asked for pseudonyms). “The term anti-vaxxer has become associated with crazy people,” says Amy, a 40-year-old Democrat with “socialist ideals.” “I feel like an outlaw.” Another woman said: “You’re either vaccinated or you’re an irrational, uneducated, dangerous conspiracy theorist who deserves to be silenced, shunned, and punished for daring to have a difference of opinion.” The options, she insisted, boil down to “shut up or deceive.”
Since she’s started to lie about being vaccinated, Sam feels like she’s living a double life. “It’s a really painful, awkward position I put myself in,” she said. “You have to keep track of who you’ve said what to. It’s the kind of thing that keeps you up at night.” But what choice did she have? The former Bernie supporter, who is “for peace and justice,” says there’s no room to admit she’s skeptical of the vaccine “without losing her freedoms” and even some of her relationships. David’s roommates, a pair of siblings, wanted nothing to do with him after their mother died of COVID-19; some close friends he’s been honest with have “really changed their opinion of me” or teasingly called him a Trump supporter. So he’s started lying. On a recent trip to New York, where bars and restaurants require proof, he brought his friend’s vaxx card and ID. Does he feel bad about it? “I don’t feel bad breaking rules that I don’t think are sensible,” he says.
While lying to a hostess is fairly low-risk, doing the same with your boss carries bigger consequences. When the ice-cream shop put a mandate in place, David tried to get an exemption, to no avail. He now works for a cryptocurrency firm that doesn’t require proof of vaccination, even though he goes into an office. He’s confident that after having COVID — well, what he suspects was COVID-19, back in January 2020 — he has full immunity anyway. How else to explain the fact that after going to three music festivals with thousands of people, he never tested positive? (Of course, according to the CDC, you should still get vaxxed even if you had the virus.) Amy knew better than to be honest with any of her colleagues at the West Coast university where she worked as a web producer; when the school implemented a mandate this fall, she left, claiming to be dissatisfied with her salary. It wasn’t a lie per se — she had recently been turned down for a raise because management had “higher priorities.” As an Asian American woman, she also felt frustrated by the university’s efforts at inclusivity; though they made up a sizable chunk of the student population, Asian people rarely appeared on the school’s website, she says. Now that she’s interviewing for new jobs, Amy’s faced with the same dilemma of how much to reveal.
Not all unvaccinated lefties are hiding in plain sight. Erin Galvin is honest with her friends and family, 98 percent of whom she says are jabbed but tend be “completely against mandates.” The very idea of lying bothers her — why rage against the shots privately only to feign support for them in public? The 35-year-old’s particular brand of vaccine hesitancy stems from her distrust of pharmaceutical companies, part of an anti-authority instinct she honed while studying at the “very hippie” University of New Hampshire where professors taught her to “question everything.” (Her Twitter bio reads “anti-establishment peasant seeking other anti-establishment peasants to organize the revolution ✌️✨🔥🧡.”) How could there not be corruption, she wondered, when the vaccine was developed on a rushed timeline by the likes of Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, brands that have been sued for billions after misleading patients or selling them cancer-causing products? Even though all three shots were still put through standard testing and trials, she didn’t trust them.
It’s all too slippery a slope for Galvin. She’s fine with masks and lockdowns but thinks mandates could “quickly descend into fascism.” (“It’s become kind of hypocritical for a lot of left-leaning people who are pro-choice to kind of fall along the line of mandate,” she told me.) Side effects are a big concern — she’s connected on Twitter with women who claim the vaccine has affected their periods, and a man who says his teenage daughter lost feeling in parts of her body after the shot. Sure, the examples are anecdotal (and not definitively correlated), but Galvin wants an open discussion about these negative reactions, and for vaccine developers to be legally responsible if something goes wrong. She worries about “irreversible” effects, like a stroke or becoming sterile (though multiple studies have found the vaccine has no effect on a woman’s fertility). In the end, there are just too many unknowns for her to feel safe. “To be honest,” she says, “it scares me.”
Fear was at the root of many arguments I heard, even if it took a while to get there. While most began by parroting some version of Galvin’s talking points about experimental vaccines and corporate corruption, their manifestos at times felt better suited for a shrink’s couch than a lectern. Many concerns were based on paranoid suspicions, not facts. Sure, the pool of those experiencing side effects might seem small, but what if the real numbers were being suppressed? What if in five years, the vaccinated were all diagnosed with cancer? (It’s worth noting that with all other vaccines, any negative effects have shown up within two months.) When they did veer into specifics, the information was often lacking in context or just plain wrong. A popular talking point was that since the vaccine doesn’t affect transmission, why get it? “The illusion of superhero invincibility that the pro-mRNA pushers have created is just that — an illusion,” one wrote to me in an email. “I don’t know that it’s super-effective,” said Galvin. “You don’t even have full protection.” (Recent studies show the jabbed are less contagious, and five times less likely to get COVID-19 in the first place.) Others said that as relatively young, healthy people, the vaccine poses a greater danger to their bodies than COVID-19 (which, again, is statistically untrue.)
How to account for these falsehoods from people who claim to want reasonable, objective debate? It made more sense when they started getting personal. There were horror stories about the medical system — my former classmate said he was “drugged and abused” at a hospital this summer after experiencing psychiatric issues, while a Black woman cited “the long history of health-care bias and genocide that has directly affected POC communities.” How could she trust doctors and scientists, given the long history of racial exploitation? Many had specific health concerns: A woman with a rare blood disorder worried the vaccine could kill her, and David was concerned the shot would exacerbate an inflammatory syndrome that’s been giving him “intestinal problems and hives” since he says he was infected with COVID-19. Even Aaron Rodgers, when pressed, claimed to be allergic to an ingredient in mRNA vaccines.
Amy is also terrified of potential side effects. She can list people who died after getting the shot (though of the five names she sent me over email, only one of the tragedies was directly linked to the vaccine) — and is convinced the actual number of people with serious reactions is being censored by scientists who have been “brainwashed to say that vaccines are effective and safe.” But even if she were to believe the chances of heart inflammation or paralysis are rare, which all research has shown, who’s to say she won’t get unlucky? “If I knew for sure the vaccine was safe for me,” Amy says, “then I would get it.”
Of course, one key difference between skeptics and vehement anti-vaxxers is that the former are much more persuadable. In fact, roughly a third of Americans who were hesitant to get vaxxed last year have since changed their minds. Some I spoke with are stiff holdouts: Galvin’s turned off by the necessity of boosters, and David’s not one to go back on a decision “after having committed for as long as I have.” But others showed more openness, like my classmate who said he’ll make a decision next spring, or a woman who’s worried about “various strains popping up.”
Amy has gone back and forth. At times she’s considered giving in, especially since she could need the vaccine to land another job (and besides, no one in her family has suffered any side effects). Then she’ll read about people’s severe reactions and completely change her mind. (“I cannot bring myself to be vaccinated,” she wrote in a recent email, linking to an article about an Australian woman who suffered a stroke as an extremely rare side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine.) Even if she does come over to the vaxx side, Amy’s begun to question her politics. While she thought Trump was horrible, maybe, if he were still president, she’d still have her university job or be able to express her concerns more freely. After a lifetime of voting for Democrats, she’s suddenly feeling open to other candidates. “It’s kind of weird,” she said. “I sometimes wonder, well, am I really a Republican?”
― but also fuck you (unperson), Monday, 22 November 2021 18:37 (two years ago) link