AP- Biden: Social media platforms 'killing people' with misinfo

New evidence showing the delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be more dangerous than other versions has prompted U.S. health officials to consider changing advice on how the nation fights the coronavirus, internal documents show.

Recommending masks for everyone and requiring vaccines for doctors and other health workers are among measures the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Post.

The documents appear to be talking points for CDC staff to use in explaining the dangers of the delta variant and “breakthrough″ infections that can occur after vaccination. Noted under communications: “Acknowledge the war has changed”

In recommending that vaccinated people resuming wearing masks indoors in virus hot spots, the CDC this week said that new evidence shows that breakthrough infections may be as transmissible as those in unvaccinated people. They cited a large recent outbreak among vaccinated individuals in the Cape Cod town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, among others, for the change.

As the documents note, COVID-19 vaccines are still highly effective at preventing serious illness and death. The CDC has always expected some breakthrough infections but has struggled with how to explain them to the public.

The documents point out that the delta variant, first detected in India, causes infections that are more contagious than the common cold, flu, smallpox and Ebola virus, and is as infectious as highly contagious chickenpox.

The internal documents also cite studies from Canada, Singapore and Scotland showing that the delta variant may poses a greater risk for hospitalization, intensive care treatment and death than the alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom.

Since January, people who got infected after vaccination make up an increasing portion of hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths among COVID-19 patients, according to the documents. That trend coincides with the spread of the delta variant.

But the CDC emphasizes that breakthrough infections are still uncommon.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Joe Biden wagered his campaign and now his presidency on the premise that government itself could still work, even at a time of fractious political division.

When the Senate voted this week, with bipartisan support, to begin work on an infrastructure bill that Biden supported, he seemed to have proof of the concept.

But the triumph was overshadowed by the surging delta variant of the coronavirus that has forced the restoration of mask guidelines, imperiled the nation’s economic recovery and threatened Biden’s central promise that he would lead the United States out of the pandemic.

“Democrats have to put wins on the board going into 2022, and COVID clouds on the horizon make getting infrastructure and reconciliation done all that much more important,” said Robert Gibbs, former press secretary to President Barack Obama. He added that it’s “imperative for the Biden administration to communicate on this regularly and prepare for us for the ups and downs of this pandemic.”

The president’s first six months in office, for which he has received strong marks in most public polls, featured the full vaccination of more than 60% of Americans, the creation of more than 3 million new jobs and the passage of a sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. And in recent days, he has made progress along the massive, two-pronged infrastructure track that could pour $4.5 trillion into the United States’ economy while he also eyed future moves on voting rights and immigration.

But the virulence of the delta strain coupled with stubborn vaccine hesitancy among a significant portion of the American population have raised alarms about another punishing wave of the pandemic, a prospect that has rattled financial markets already nervously eyeing the possibility of long-term inflation.

And now Biden has entered a more challenging phase of his presidency as the virus has once more proven to be an intractable foe that now endangers the nation’s fragile return to normalcy.

“I know this is hard to hear. I know it’s frustrating. I know it’s exhausting to think we’re still in this fight,” Biden said to reporters at the White House on Thursday. “And I know we hoped this would be a simple, straightforward line, without problems or new challenges. But that isn’t real life.”

At the same time, the administration response has hardly been seamless. The administration has been criticized about its messaging on the virus, including confusing guidance this week as to when and why even vaccinated people would need to resume wearing masks indoors.

Biden himself had decreed July 4th to be the day that American declared its “independence” from the virus in front of 1,000 mask-free people at the White House. But just weeks later, staffers and journalists working at the White House were required to don face coverings again, regardless of their vaccination status.

And across the country, Americans who reveled in a return to normalcy are now being asked to wear masks again, stirring resentment in some of those who have followed health guidelines throughout the pandemic, including getting the shot. And the rollback calls into question whether the Biden administration had been too quick to relax guidelines and now risked losing some of the public’s confidence.

“They broke their word. They broke their own rules,” said Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “And now they’ve broken the trust of the American people.”

To be sure, though, the vaccine hesitancy has been most pronounced in areas strongly associated with support for former President Donald Trump, and some conservative media outlets have amplified the wariness.

Any president must be able to set aside the most organized, carefully laid plans to deal with a sudden crisis. Trump was overwhelmed by the pandemic, his best reelection argument — a strong economy — vanishing overnight while his administration’s erratic and sporadic response to the virus was judged harshly by voters.

Biden’s White House is more methodical and spent months carefully working on its infrastructure plan, which the president has prioritized for months even amid calls from some in his own party to focus on voting rights. The strategy was crafted to reach a bipartisan agreement by persuading at least 10 Republicans to lay down their partisan arms to reach a deal on so-called hard infrastructure — highways, broadband internet access, mass transit — while then proceeding on a larger, Democrats-only budget reconciliation vote for the rest of the plan.

Though the negotiations were left for dead more than once, Biden’s bet on reaching across the aisle paid off, as 17 GOP senators voted to advance the nearly $1 trillion bipartisan plan. It marked a significant win for the White House, even as numerous twists and turns surely lie ahead, including keeping all the Democrats in line for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan.

Biden had framed it as necessary to prove that the two parties could still work together as a demonstration that democracies could still deliver for their people.

“Our economy grew more in six months than most Wall Street forecasters expected for the entire year before we implemented our plan,” said Biden, who predicted that the infrastructure deal is “going to continue this momentum over the long term by making the most significant investment to rebuild America in nearly a century.”

Biden has pushed his broadly popular agenda directly into conservative strongholds — he has held about a half-dozen events in Republican-controlled districts in recent weeks — in an effort to paint Republicans as the party of no while hoping to rein in their turnout next fall when he tries to help preserve threadbare Democratic majorities in Congress.

With a wary eye on inflation, the president is betting that voters will reward him for his policies, as the White House argues it is Republicans who are running solely on identity politics rather than sincerely delivering for their voters.

But that strategy depends on the policy working — which is what makes the virus so dangerous.

If another wave causes businesses or schools to close, not only would the public’s faith in Biden’s management of the virus surely waver, but the economic recovery would likely stagnate, jeopardizing the Democrats’ central arguments heading into next fall’s midterms.

“We’re not out of the woods,” Gibbs said.

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Louisiana ordered nearly everyone, vaccinated or not, to wear masks again in all indoor public settings, including schools and colleges, and other cities and states likewise moved to reinstate precautions to counter a crisis blamed on the fast-spreading variant and stubborn resistance to getting the vaccine.

“As fast as we are opening up units, they’re being filled with COVID patients,” lamented Dr. Sergio Segarra, chief medical officer of Baptist Hospital Miami, where the Florida chain reported an increase of well over 140% in the past two weeks in the number of people now hospitalized with the virus. “As quickly as we can discharge them they’re coming in and they’re coming in very sick. We started seeing entire families come down.”

Biden had set a goal of reaching the 70% threshold by the Fourth of July. But that target was set well before the highly contagious delta variant enabled the virus to come storming back and undermined the assumptions that were used to arrive at that figure.

There was was no celebration at the White House on Monday, nor a setting of a new target, as the administration instead struggles to overcome public resistance.

The 70% target marked the low-end of initial government estimates for what would be necessary to achieve herd immunity in the U.S. That has been rendered insufficient by the delta variant.

The U.S. still has not hit the administration’s other goal of fully vaccinating 165 million American adults by July 4. It is about 8.5 million short.

New cases per day in the U.S. have increased sixfold over the past month to an average of nearly 80,000, a level not seen since mid-February. And deaths per day have climbed over the past two weeks from an average of 259 to 360. Those are still well below the 3,400 deaths and a quarter-million cases per day seen during the worst of the outbreak, in January.

Some places around the country are seeing newly confirmed infections and hospital caseloads reach their highest levels since the pandemic began a year and a half ago. Nearly all deaths and serious illnesses now are in unvaccinated people.

The surge has led states and cities across the U.S. to beat a retreat, just weeks after it looked as if the country was going to see a close-to-normal summer.

Health officials in San Francisco and six other Bay Area counties announced Monday they are reinstating a requirement that everyone — vaccinated or not — wear masks in public indoor spaces.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said New York City airport and transit workers will have to get vaccinated or face weekly testing. He stopped short of mandating either masks or inoculations for the general public, saying he lacks legal authority to do so.

Denver’s mayor said said the city will require police officers, firefighters and certain other municipal employees to get vaccinated, along with workers at schools, nursing homes, hospitals and jails.

Minnesota’s public colleges and universities will require masks while indoors on campus, regardless of vaccination status. And New Jersey said workers at state-run nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals and other such institutions must get the shot or face regular testing.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that a nationwide vaccination requirement “is not on the table,” but noted that employers have the right to take that step as they see fit.

In Florida, it took two months last summer for the number of people in the hospital with the coronavirus to jump from 2,000 to 10,000. It took only 27 days this summer for Florida hospitals to see that same increase, said Florida Hospital Association President Mary Mayhew.

She noted also that this time, 96% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated and are far younger, many of them in their 20s and 30s.

While setting a national vaccination goal may have been useful for trying to drum up enthusiasm for the shots, 70% of Americans getting one shot was never going to be enough to prevent surges among unvaccinated groups. And when he announced the goal, Biden acknowledged it was just a first step.

It’s the level of vaccinations in a community — not a broad national average — that can slow an outbreak or allow it to flourish. Vaccination rates from region to region differ wildly, and some places are far more vulnerable than others.

Vaccination rates in some Southern states are far lower than they are New England. Vermont has fully inoculated nearly 78% of its adult population. Alabama has just cracked 43%.

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Vaccine skeptics and anti-maskers are instead sucking down horse paste — the latest snake-oil "miracle cure" — once they become sick with COVID-19, resulting in an increase in calls to poison control centers, the Daily Beast reported Friday.

The horse paste contains ivermectin, which is normally used to treat parasites in humans and livestock but is now being prescribed by quack doctors and promoted in online forums as the latest version of the Trumpian drug hydroxychloroquine.

One of the groups behind the ivermectin craze is America's Frontline Doctors, the Trump-promoted Texas group that includes accused Capitol insurrectionist Dr. Simone Gold and "alien DNA" specialist Dr. Stella Immanuel.

"Devotees have besieged pharmacists with prescriptions from shady online prescribers, forcing pharmacies to crack down and treat the antiparasitic drugs like opioids," the Daily Beast reports. "As human-approved ivermectin prescriptions have been harder to come by, enthusiasts have taken to raiding rural tractor supply stores in search of ivermectin horse paste (packed with 'apple flavor!') and weighed the benefits of taking ivermectin 'sheep drench' and a noromectin 'injection for swine and cattle.'"

As far as its efficacy in treating COVID-19, invermectin remains unproven. Studies touted in support of the drug were later withdrawn or heavily criticized due to errors, leading experts to conclude that further randomized trials are needed. The FDA, meanwhile, has cautioned people against taking drugs intended for large animals because they are highly concentrated.

A Texas-based poison control specialist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions, told the Daily Beast that while there isn't an epidemic of ivermectin overdoses, there has been a noticeable increase in calls.

"The irony is, in a severe ivermectin overdose patients will end up needing to be intubated to protect their airway, meanwhile, a lot of them are taking the ivermectin to allegedly treat their COVID… to avoid ultimately being intubated and placed on a ventilator," the poison control specialist said.

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The U.S. was averaging about 11,000 cases a day in late June. Now the number is 107,143.

It took the U.S. about nine months to cross the 100,000 average case number in November before peaking at about 250,000 in early January. Cases bottomed out in June but took about six weeks to go back above 100,000, despite a vaccine that has been given to more than 70% of the adult population.



The seven-day average for daily new deaths also increased, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. It rose over the past two weeks from about 270 deaths per day to nearly 500 a day as of Friday.

The virus is spreading quickly through unvaccinated populations, especially in the South where hospitals have been overrun with patients.

Health officials are fearful that cases will continue to soar if more Americans don’t embrace the vaccine.

“Our models show that if we don’t (vaccinate people), we could be up to several hundred thousand cases a day, similar to our surge in early January,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said on CNN this week.

The number of Americans hospitalized with the virus has also skyrocketed and it has gotten so bad that many hospitals are scrambling to find beds for patients in far-off locations.

Houston officials say the latest wave of COVID-19 cases is pushing the local health care system to nearly “a breaking point,” resulting in some patients having to be transferred out of the city to get medical care, including one who had to be taken to North Dakota.

Dr. David Persse, who is health authority for the Houston Health Department and EMS medical director, said some ambulances were waiting hours to offload patients at Houston area hospitals because no beds were available. Persse said he feared this would lead to prolonged respond times to 911 medical calls.


“The health care system right now is nearly at a breaking point ... For the next three weeks or so, I see no relief on what’s happening in emergency departments,” Persse said Thursday.

Last weekend, a patient in Houston had to be transferred to North Dakota to get medical care. An 11-month-old girl with COVID-19 and who was having seizures had to be transported on Thursday from Houston to a hospital 170 miles (274 kilometers) away in Temple.

In Missouri, 30 ambulances and more than 60 medical personnel will be stationed across the state to help transport COVID-19 patients to other regions if nearby hospitals are too full to admit them, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson announced Friday.

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ALSEA, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon school superintendent is telling parents they can get their children out of wearing masks by citing federal disability law. A pastor at a California megachurch is offering religious exemptions for anyone morally conflicted over vaccine requirements.

And Louisiana’s attorney general has posted sample letters on his office’s Facebook page for those seeking to get around the governor’s mask rules.

Across the U.S., religious figures, doctors, public officials and other community leaders are trying to help people circumvent COVID-19 precautions.

While proponents of these workarounds say they are looking out for children’s health and parents’ rights, others say such stratagems are dishonest and irresponsible and could undermine efforts to beat back the highly contagious delta variant.

Mask and vaccine requirements vary from state to state but often allow exemptions for certain medical conditions or religious or philosophical objections.

In Oregon, Superintendent Marc Thielman of the rural Alsea School District told parents they can sidestep the governor’s school mask requirement by applying for an accommodation for their children under federal disabilities law.

Thielman said he hit upon the idea after the governor’s mandate generated “huge, huge pushback” from parents.

“The majority of my parents are skeptical and are no longer believing what they’re told” about COVID-19, said Thielman, whose district in the state’s coastal mountains begins classes Monday. “I’ve got a majority of my parents saying, ‘Are there any options?’”

In a letter to educators this past week, Democratic Gov. Kate Brown said she was shocked that Thielman was undermining her policies by “instructing students to lie” about having a disability.

Brown has mandated masks in schools and vaccinations for all school staff amid a surge in infections that is clobbering Oregon. The state has broken its record for COVID-19 hospitalizations day after day, and cases among children have increased dramatically.

Thielman, who is planning to run for governor next year, when Brown can’t seek reelection because of term limits, said he is not anti-mask but is sensitive to parents’ concerns that face coverings can cause anxiety and headaches in children.

In some cases, he said, he believes those problems justify an exemption under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 because they interfere with learning.

But Laurie VanderPloeg, an associate executive director at the Council for Exceptional Children, an advocacy group, cautioned that under the federal law, children would not be allowed to go maskless simply because they asked.

Under the law, she said, school districts would have to go through a formal process to establish whether a child does, in fact, have a particular mental or physical disability, such as a respiratory condition, that would warrant an exception to the mask rule.

In Kansas, the Spring Hill school board is allowing parents to claim a medical or mental health exemption from the county’s requirement that elementary school students mask up. They do not need a medical provider to sign off.

Board member Ali Seeling said the idea is to give parents “the freedom to make health decisions for their own children.”

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican who regularly spars with Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, posted sample letters that would allow parents to seek a philosophical or religious exemption from Edwards’ mask rule at schools — or from a vaccine requirement, if one is enacted.

The letters have been shared by GOP lawmakers and thousands of others.

“Louisiana is not governed by a dictatorship. The question is: ‘who gets to determine the healthcare choices for you and your child?’ In a free society, the answer is the citizen — not the state,” Landry wrote on Facebook.

Edwards accused the attorney general of creating confusion and defended his policy on face coverings.

“By adopting these measures — and ignoring those that are unwilling to acknowledge the current crisis — we can keep our kids in school this year and keep them safe,” the governor said.

In California, the state medical board is investigating a doctor who critics say is handing out dozens of one-sentence mask exemptions for children in an attempt to evade the statewide school mask requirement.

Dr. Michael Huang, who has a practice in the Sacramento suburb of Roseville, declined to answer questions from The Associated Press but told other news outlets that he examines each child and issues exemptions appropriately. The California Medical Association issued a statement condemning “rogue physicians” selling “bogus” exemptions.

In a neighboring suburb, Pastor Greg Fairrington of Rocklin’s Destiny Christian Church has issued at least 3,000 religious exemptions to people with objections to the vaccine, which is becoming mandatory in an increasing number of places in California.

He said in a statement that his church has received thousands of calls from doctors, nurses, teachers and first responders terrified of losing their jobs because they don’t want to get vaccinated. His office declined to share the exemption letter.

“We are not anti-vaccine,” he said. “At the same time, we believe in the freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. The vaccine poses a morally compromising situation for many people of faith.”

Health experts such as Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, warned that such stratagems will sow confusion about masks and vaccinations.

The virus is “looking for fractures in the system,” he said, “and we have plenty of fractures in the system.”

Oregon resident Jenny Jonak, who has an 11-year-old daughter with autism and health problems that make her more susceptible to COVID-19, said wearing masks is a “very small inconvenience” to protect vulnerable students.

“If a child really has a genuine reason, if there’s some sort of breathing or respiratory problem, then that should be respected,” she said. “But if not, then I don’t know what we’re teaching our children if we’re teaching them basically that something as simple as wearing a mask is something that they should bend the rules for.”

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Students gathered around the entrance gate outside Fort Lauderdale High School on Wednesday morning as Dan Bauman and his daughter argued with a resource officer over the school’s mask mandate, police records show.

Fed up with the daily antics, another student spoke up.

“I’ve had enough for four days,” she said, according to an arrest report.

Noticing Bauman was recording her, the student reached for his phone. Bauman swiftly grabbed her hand, twisted it and pushed her against the gate, police said. Officers pulled him off the student.

Fort Lauderdale police immediately arrested Bauman, who has repeatedly had law enforcement called on him for alleged mask violations, and charged him with child abuse, according to the arrest report.

Bauman, 50, was taken to Broward County Jail. Bond has not been set. A lawyer was not listed in jail records, and it is unclear when he is due in court.

After Texas parent rips mask off teacher’s face, school official warns: ‘Do not fight mask wars in our schools’

The incident is the latest confrontation over school mask mandates as students return to the classroom. Last week, a parent in an Austin school district ripped a mask off a teacher’s face. A week earlier, a parent in California allegedly yelled at a school principal over mask requirements and then struck a teacher.

Tensions are particularly high in Florida, where more than half the state’s students are enrolled in school districts that have defied Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on mask requirements, despite threats of funding cuts. Coronavirus cases continue to surge in Florida as the highly contagious delta variant rapidly spreads. The positivity rate among reported tests is nearly 20 percent, according to The Washington Post’s coronavirus tracker. In the past week, new daily reported deaths rose over 612 percent.

Broward County Public Schools, the home of Fort Lauderdale High School and the sixth largest school district in the country, was one of the first counties to defy DeSantis’s order. On Friday, Florida’s education commissioner warned that the school board could lose state funding if it did not reverse its mask requirements.

More than half of Florida’s students now go to schools mandating masks in defiance of DeSantis

Bauman has consistently opposed the school’s mask rules, calling them illegal.

“It’s against the law, it’s against the Parents’ Bill of Rights,” he told WFOR off school grounds Wednesday before his arrest, with his daughter and protesters by his side. “Our belief is it doesn’t stop the spread of the virus. It doesn’t control it, it does more harm than good.”

Only one student out of more than 2,200 at Fort Lauderdale High School has tested positive for covid since the first day of school on Aug. 18, according to the county’s coronavirus dashboard. Districtwide, 84 students out of over 260,000 have tested positive for the virus this school year.

Bauman’s daughter, a sophomore who is attending the high school for the first time this year according to WFOR, said she thinks masks should be optional.

“I want to be able to go to school like everyone does, but I can’t wear a mask. I can’t breathe in it, and I want to have that choice,” she said.

“It’s against the law, it’s against the Parents’ Bill of Rights,” he told WFOR off school grounds Wednesday before his arrest, with his daughter and protesters by his side. “Our belief is it doesn’t stop the spread of the virus. It doesn’t control it, it does more harm than good.”

Only one student out of more than 2,200 at Fort Lauderdale High School has tested positive for covid since the first day of school on Aug. 18, according to the county’s coronavirus dashboard. Districtwide, 84 students out of over 260,000 have tested positive for the virus this school year.

Bauman’s daughter, a sophomore who is attending the high school for the first time this year according to WFOR, said she thinks masks should be optional.

“I want to be able to go to school like everyone does, but I can’t wear a mask. I can’t breathe in it, and I want to have that choice,” she said.

Battle over school masking escalates in Florida

Bauman and his daughter approached the school’s gate at about 7:25 a.m. on Wednesday, police said in a statement to The Post. The school resource officer wrote in his report that he turned on his body camera as he saw Bauman approaching because he is “known to cause disruption due to protesting the school board’s mask policy.” (Police have not released the footage, citing an open and active investigation.)

Bauman held up his phone to record the interaction with the officer, police said.

After the student reached for his phone, “[Bauman] then pushed the child by the shoulder and grabbed her hand and twisted her arm in an aggressive manner,” the school resource officer wrote in the arrest report, “which caused me and the security [guard] to pull [Bauman] off the child.”

Sean Curran, the school’s principal, told WFOR that the students have been “incredible” about wearing masks.

“Every single one of them is wearing it and are supportive of what the measures are to keep everyone safe,” he said.

Broward County Public Schools said in a statement to WPLG that the mask policy is in place to ensure “students have a safe and healthy learning environment, especially now that they are back in the classrooms.” The district would not comment further on Wednesday’s incident and did not immediately respond to a request from The Post.

Fort Lauderdale police have issued Bauman at least five trespassing warnings in the past year and a half over mask violations, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

Last August, police arrived at a Home Depot after he allegedly wore pink thong underwear as a mask and refused to put on a face covering even after security offered him one. Two months later, a Publix grocery store warned him that he was trespassing after he allegedly tried to enter maskless, according to the Sun-Sentinel. He then allegedly accused a store employee of grabbing him, despite security footage showing there was no physical contact.

According to the Sun-Sentinel, he allegedly repeated similar antics at a UPS store and at a post office, where he tried to enter with underwear in place of a mask or with no mask at all. When two young women asked Bauman to wear a mask inside a pharmacy last December, he allegedly punched one of the women and called the other an offensive slur, the Sun-Sentinel reported. The women allegedly hit back and hurled a chair at him.

Court records do not indicate that he was criminally charged in those cases.

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