Philip Carr Valentine was an American conservative talk radio host, author and actor. He broadcast daily on WWTN, a Cumulus Media station in Nashville, Tennessee, and hosted The Phil Valentine Show, syndicated nationally through the Westwood One radio network. He was an opponent of a proposed state income tax in Tennessee and denied climate change.
Joseph Michael Mercola is an American alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and Internet business personality. He markets largely unproven dietary supplements and medical devices. On his website, Mercola and colleagues advocate unproven and pseudoscientific alternative health notions including homeopathy and opposition to vaccination. These positions have received persistent criticism. Mercola is a member of several alternative medicine organizations as well as the political advocacy group Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which promotes scientifically discredited views about medicine and disease. He is the author of two books.
Houston Methodist Hospital is the flagship quaternary care hospital of Houston Methodist academic medical center. Located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas, Houston Methodist Hospital was established in 1919 during the height of the Spanish influenza epidemic as an outreach ministry of Methodist Episcopal Church. Houston Methodist comprises eight hospitals, an academic institute, a primary care group, and more than 300 locations throughout greater Houston.
Margaret Brennan is an American journalist based in Washington, D.C. She is the current moderator of Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan on CBS News, the network's chief foreign affairs correspondent, and a fill-in and substitute anchor for CBS Evening News. Brennan was previously a White House correspondent for CBS and has covered Washington since 2012.
Michael Specter is an American journalist who has been a staff writer, focusing on science, technology, and global public health at The New Yorker since September 1998. He has also written for The Washington Post and The New York Times. Since 2021 he has also taught writing and, along with a colleague, a course called “Safeguarding the Future” at MIT. He has previously served as an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard College.
Martin Adel Makary is a British-American surgeon, professor, author, and medical commentator. He practices surgical oncology and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, is Mark Ravitch Chair in Gastrointestinal Surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and is the chief of Islet Transplant Surgery at Johns Hopkins.
Dame Sarah Catherine Gilbert FRS is an English vaccinologist who is a Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Vaccitech. She specialises in the development of vaccines against influenza and emerging viral pathogens. She led the development and testing of the universal flu vaccine, which underwent clinical trials in 2011.
On December 31, 2019, China announced the discovery of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. The first American case was reported on January 20, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency on January 31. Restrictions were placed on flights arriving from China, but the initial U.S. response to the pandemic was otherwise slow in terms of preparing the healthcare system, stopping other travel, and testing. The first known American deaths occurred in February and in late February President Donald Trump proposed allocating $2.5 billion to fight the outbreak. Instead, Congress approved $8.3 billion with only Senator Rand Paul and two House representatives voting against, and Trump signed the bill, the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020, on March 6. Trump declared a national emergency on March 13. The government also purchased large quantities of medical equipment, invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950 to assist. By mid-April, disaster declarations were made by all states and territories as they all had increasing cases. A second wave of infections began in June, following relaxed restrictions in several states, leading to daily cases surpassing 60,000. By mid-October, a third surge of cases began; there were over 200,000 new daily cases during parts of December 2020 and January 2021.
Israel's COVID-19 vaccination programme, officially named "Give a Shoulder", began on 19 December 2020, and has been praised for its speed, having given twenty percent of the Israeli population the first dose of the vaccines' two dose regimen in the span of three weeks.
The COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the United States is an ongoing mass immunization campaign for the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first granted emergency use authorization to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine on December 10, 2020, and mass vaccinations began four days later. The Moderna vaccine was granted emergency use authorization on December 17, 2020, and the Janssen vaccine was granted emergency use authorization on February 27, 2021. It was not until April 19, 2021, that all U.S. states had opened vaccine eligibility to residents aged 16 and over. On May 10, 2021, the FDA approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for adolescents aged 12 to 15. On August 23, 2021, the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine for individuals aged 16 and over.
COVID-19 vaccination in Angola is an ongoing immunisation campaign against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), in response to the ongoing pandemic in the country. As of 15 June 2021, Angola has administered 1,314,375 doses of vaccines.822,109 people with the first dose and 492,266 people fully vaccinated. Angola began their vaccination program shortly after receiving their first shipment of Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine in early March 2021.
Medical Racism: The New Apartheid is a 2021 video production that promotes conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines. Distributed by the anti-vaccination group Children's Health Defense, it alleges the COVID-19 vaccination efforts are a cover to conduct experiments on the African American and Latin communities. Public health communication experts say the video presents past injustices committed against African Americans in order to make debunked anti-vaccination claims more believable.
Software for COVID-19 pandemic mitigation takes many forms. It includes mobile apps for contact tracing and notifications about infection risks, vaccine passports, software for enabling – or improving the effectiveness of – lockdowns and social distancing, Web software for the creation of related information services, and research and development software. A common issue is that few apps interoperate, reducing their effectiveness.
The following is the timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in India from January 2021 to the May 2021. The complexity of the COVID-19 data reporting in India has been scrutinized extensively because of the disagreement between the undocumented morbidity rate and the low rates of case fatality in comparison to other countries.
COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the United States is the sociocultural phenomenon of individuals refusing or displaying hesitance towards receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the United States can be considered as part of the broader history of vaccine hesitancy.
The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize culinary professionals in the United States. The awards recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists each year, and are generally scheduled around James Beard's May birthday.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 vaccine mandates have been enacted by numerous states and municipalities in the United States, and also by private entities. In September 2021, President Joe Biden announced that the federal government would take steps to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for certain entities under the authority of the federal government or federal agencies. Most federal mandates thus imposed were either overturned through litigation, or withdrawn by the administration, although a mandate on health care workers in institutions receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds was upheld. All federal mandates were lifted when the national emergency was declared to have ended in May 2023. A small number of states have gone in the opposite direction, through executive orders or legislation designed to limit vaccination mandates.
Media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic includes reporting on the deaths of anti-vaccine advocates from COVID-19 as a phenomenon occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic. The media also reported on various websites documenting such deaths, with some outlets questioning whether this practice was overly unsympathetic. Reports noted phenomena including "deathbed conversions", in which vaccine opponents reportedly changed their minds and began encouraging vaccination before dying, with these claims meeting continued skepticism by vaccination opponents; and on groups of deaths within specific demographics, such as anti-vaccine radio hosts.
The Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism is a non-profit media group based in South Africa. Bhekisisa, meaning "to scrutinize" in the Zulu language, focuses on health coverage from a social justice perspective, utilizing narrative and solutions journalism.
Julie Leask, also known as Julie-Anne Leask, is an Australian social scientist and professor in the School of Public Health and Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a leading researcher on social and behavioural aspects of vaccination and infectious disease prevention. Leask's research focuses on vaccine uptake, communication, strengthening vaccination programs and policy. Her flagship project is Sharing Knowledge About Immunisation (SKAI), a vaccination communication package designed to improve vaccination conversations between parents and health care workers. Additionally, Leask is an advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) on vaccine acceptance and demand issues and was the chair of the WHO Measuring Behavioural and Social Drivers of Vaccination working group (2018–2022).
