#Even Henry and the Chief are not immune

[is-that-sand-in-my-waffles]

Psych is such a great show because practically every character is the absolute Silliest of Billies and this fact only becomes clearer the further you watch into the show.

[antihumanism]

When I type everything out as a single run-on sentence I want you to imagine me cornering you off-guard in a crowded room, my empty brown cow eyes staring straight at you and reflecting you--nopony home here, she checked out and hopped away forever ago on the toxic chemical trains and clacking cattle cars years ago--and just, for no reason, I’m here and you’re there pocketed in the corner of a crowded room, and I’m channeling my alternate history past-self who was a preacher that got kicked out of the church for delivering sermons about the impossibility of sin and just ran off to Point Sur with my harem of distractions since I could never stop blessing my congregation saying “Go forth and know that you cannot sin, in the beautiful eyes of God and in my beautiful eyes there can be no wrong or evil” which backfired on me when they started setting fires and it all went to Hell, but I’ve won out over them because the world honored my wishes when I sighed “I should like to start again,” and so I’m here with you and you’re hear with me and I’m saying some insane shit like: “Looking back on Emily’s early works it is easy to see where her later reactionary turn comes from, because, from the start, Alfred Alfer was a story about the fear of castration, I mean, the first video was literally about Alfred getting neutered and escaping into a violent fantasy where he is loved and praised for his violence and the ‘punchline’ establishes the general theme of ‘reality by despair,’ which is to say that Alfred’s clearly dissociative episode is ‘verified’ by his destruction and it is this self-destruction that establishes ‘reality,’ like ‘pinch me i might be dreaming,’ but the pinch is violent and unfair self-destruction as hope is still ripped away, but hope remains, because it is a hope to die rather than be changed by the world, and this theme remains throughout her most famous work (the Alfred’s Playhouse trilogy which cements in canon the jokes of her previous Rise of Alfred cartoon) where Alfred is possessed by the spirits of Stalin and Hitler--a false equivalency made by the authoritarians that have passed for liberals for years--in Rise of Alfred, one would be remiss not to mention the phallic imagery in both the title and the video itself, Alfred is cut loose upon the world by the absence of a Near God or little other by the orders of a Distant God or big Other (in this video played by a droning and irrelevant corporate figure that can offer nothing more than a wall without lead paint that one can lick), and this is the essence of reactionary thought, the idea of a big Other who is totally incompetent yet all powerful and somehow worth respecting and suffering for (King Henry II saying ‘will no one rid me of this troublesome priest’ or the departed Daiymo of the 47 Ronin), the reactionary sees the big Other as a master who can only set the dogs off the chain, the police chief who needs to get out of the way so McBain or Dirty Harry or Paul Kersey (especially in Death Wish III) can do what needs to be done and purge away all the filth and make the world right again (no different than Rambo--even the first movie, which for all of it’s goods part still is  reactionary propaganda bullshit pushing the fascist lies about a ‘fifth column’ that was rude to poor little meow meow war criminals--or modern day fantasies about nuking all of MENA until it glows green (fantasies delivered to raucous applause at Republican presidential conventions); the reactionary is perpetually trapped in this fantasy of destroying the world and escaping into the void of space, freed of the ground where the riff-raff are so they don’t have to negotiate life with their neighbors, and this is true, yes, even of people who spout bullshit about Fully Automated Luxury Communism who only want the right to consume as much as possible free of guilt--a condition they think is inflicting upon them by the big Other--as the Champagne of Shame Socialists of the 60s), and the righting of the world for the reactionary is just that, that the world must be Righted and the reactionary must be loved for all of their violence and because of their violence, for the reactionary finds themselves ever needing new excuses as they open new fronts in their fake, phony Culture War, and that is all they need (excuses), which is why Emily is so obsessed with justifying her edgy shit based on some Trauma (which is handy excuse to do Anything, even Things that Cannot Be Excused like war or self-harm or wanting to be seen), and so here you should already be able to hear so much madness, so many plaintive cries, all aligning around the same point (the trannies in the ‘wrong’ bathroom, the refugees in the ‘wrong’ country, the people in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood, the Jewish Question, etc), and, anyway, so in Rise of Alfred, Emily’s OC directly addresses the audience and tells them that they must love him/her--the castrated bitch desperate to be let off the leash--and in Alfred’s Playhouse she/he simultaneously affirms and denies the nature of a trauma that justifies everything (one is constantly reminded of The Act of Killing where one of the mass murderers imagines how, depending on the editing of the final film, he could be either a woobie or a war criminal) as the Trauma is simultaneously a joke--’sodomized with a popsicle!’--and the alleged real event that motivates her self-mutilation as we’re expected to believe Emily is processing something, but what is she is processing, hmmmm, isn’t that the true spice,” I rail and rave against your poor ear drums as my empty, dead cow’s eyes capture your entire body and reflect it back at you and the ice cubes in my drink pop and shatter and dissolve and as my fist clenches tighter and tighter around the glass containing them and I continue: she’s processing a fear of castration, which is shown clearly in Alfred’s Playhouse where Alfred’s “sodomy” is demonstrated by the sight of his crotch covered in blood (a scene that will be repeated in The Alfred Alfer Movie) but “what is castration,” one might ask, and one can respond “it is the removal of power by the Father,” and this is how we wrap back around to our root in the nature of Emily the Reactionary who believes herself to be deprived of the power she holds by The Bolshevik Jew that has inserted itself between her and the Father and this is the cause of the big Other’s ineffectiveness, and this is also the core of the reactionary as a whole, the reactionary doesn’t want a daddy to control them, but a Master to set them off the chain because they hate the Father who has castrated them, this is the nature of the mumbling corporate manager in Rise of Alfred, but it is also the nature of Alfred herself--and now you may ask if Emily is trans and the answer is I literally couldn’t fucking care less about any question left forever unanswered on God’s Green Earth and you shouldn’t care either--but Alfred the Castrated is also the Father/Mother of Alfred the Dictator, the murderous inner-self that is immune to consequences of the onrushing future (The Alfred Alfer Movie) but not immune to the justifications of the imagined past (Alfred’s Playhouse trilogy), and therefore free to inflict whatever violence that Emily the Reactionary desires, and it is in pursuit of this freedom that the reactionaries set off in the name of New Sincerity (two things to be noted here: (1) the Death of Irony was proclaimed at the birth of the 21st century police state and the new Forever War with all of its genocidal objectives, that is to say, 9/11, and (2) the broken necked coward who complained of American Psycho that it’s author provided no easy outs for easy survival was the one who offed himself while Bateman’s father still lives) and the Talking Cure (i miss who we used to be), and at this you should see me slugging back the whole lukewarm glass in between two syllables and continuing on without pause (as if this dog still has legs on which to receive them in any case), “Emily, like Alex Jones, is so desperate for an excuse because neither of them can accept that they have to be the one that pulls the trigger, like all liars they don’t understand that they have to define reality by action, the answer to what one might do is found in the difference between the types of irony, one type is constantly desperate for excuses (such as the broken necked coward found one day) for violence, and the other irony, the true spice, is the irony that releases from excuses into violence and energy, one must seek not to know or endure but to inflict, knowing that this inflicting was always inevitable, no searching for justifications, instead the answer is to realize that there was never a chain there connecting you to the Master or the present to the past, and the Father/Mother never had the power of castration (the past, after all, is a foreign country bombed and blasted to ruins already and better forgotten), and you can just be fucked up and terrible and do whatever amuses you right now without needing an excuse, and to the extent that anyone should, one should, because that is what fascism needs, fascism needs the need for an excuse and that is the irony of fascism--where the falling angel (the superego) meets the rising ape (the id) in an ego of ultimate violence which seeks only release from both of its creations in an instinctually and totally misunderstood caricature of dialectics--which opposes its opposite irony (the irony without fascism which is the id’s violence against purpose and reason rising free of anything else to obstruct it), and if you let go of that, if you just, ya know, if you just, you just have to cut loose and go and no one can stop you until it is too late, because there’s no Jew sitting over your shoulder to justify everything in terms of opposition or support, not even The Nazarene is real, but do you understand that you’ve always been free to just go? You’re free to go. You’ve been free to go all this time. You never needed permission for this or anything else. You’ve been free to go all this time. You’re free to go. A whole day off. Just mind the mo(u)rning and get on with it.”

[deputystakes-moved]

FILE — THE LAPIERRE INFECTION.   PART I.   INTRODUCTION.

the lapierre infection, considered the first and only manmade strain of vampirism, was the slayer program’s final attempt at creating super soldiers.   all the stops had been pulled.   the end of all war was in sight.   there had been previous serums developed, and successfully administered, that had proven to be little victories for the corps.   the third trial of the ████ serum, nicknamed the ‘ pain immunization ’ among slayers — made the elite squads of the slayer corps unstoppable.   ghost stories were told of slayers rising, half-dead, to finish their missions.   pain no longer inhibited them, they could power through broken limbs, bullet wounds, whatever had previously been considered fatal.   this so-called immunization made the elite squads a force to be reckoned with.   they were unstoppable, given the ability to push past the human limit.   even before the ████ serum, they had gone through inhumane medical trials which provided them with increased strength and speed, enhanced senses — and yet, it was not enough.   slayers had nearly become a subspecies of their own.   but it was not enough.

to fight monsters, the slayer corps created monsters of their own.   they created vampires.   dr. sebastien lapierre and isaac reid spearheaded the final project, handpicking the slayers that would be subjected to the most brutal trial the corps would ever give the green light to.   henri lapierre, carson cage, and twelve other slayers would be selected.   sergeant graves and command master chief blackwood were almost selected, but dodged the trials, as they were both set to aid in a classified operation overseas and rejected by dr. reid.   sergeant cage dodged the trials, as well — by going AWOL.   which was a wise decision, on his behalf, for all other slayers who underwent the trials would die.   all, save for henri lapierre.   patient zero of the lapierre infection.   the new predator at the top of the food chain.

those affected by the lapierre infection, consequently referred to as the infected, are some of the most dangerous entities humanity has encountered.   they are dangerous to humans, to vampires, and to themselves.   to undergo the violent change, one must introduce infected blood to their body intravenously or via direct consumption.   the aforementioned change is not survived by most, and even if one does survive — their humanity, often, does not.   those with the lapierre infection are reduced to a shell of their former selves, relying on the terrible instinct the infection provides.   the infected often form small circles, akin to packs, and if starvation does not kill them — they kill each other.   for the most horrible aspect of the infected’s existence is their hunger.   animal blood cannot sate them, and human food, though providing brief contentment, will not sustain them.   the infected rely on the blood of humans, vampires, and other infected.   their lifespans are typically short, and their deaths are just as bloody as their rebirths.

it should also be taken into consideration that the reason for their low population is patient zero himself.   henri lapierre actively hunts his own kind, motivated by his newfound hatred of all that is living and survival instinct.   lapierre recognizes the brutality of his own kind, and he’s seen how sloppy they can get.   the government has hidden and masked the existence of the infected since henri escaped the facility, and they owe much of their success to henri himself.   lapierre kills humans, slayers, vampires, and infected alike.   he is the embodiment of the corps’ accumulated monstrosities; he is brutal.   and he sits, comfortably, at the very top of the food chain.   untouchable and unmoved.

[paulinedorchester]

Mosley, Leonard. Backs to the Wall: London Under Fire, 1939-1954. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971; reprint, as Backs to the Wall: The Heroic Story of the People of London During World War II, New York: Random House, 1971.

Each generation gets the history that it needs — or wants, or demands. That’s what kept going through my head as I read Backs to the Wall, which appeared three years after France’s youth explicitly rejected both Charles de Gaulle, the self-appointed leader of the Free French during World War II, and the political ideology that he represented, and amidst ongoing unrest over the Vietnam War. (It’s also worth mentioning that it was published in the same year as Norman Longmate’s How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War and two years after Angus Calder’s The People’s War.) This book gives up a World War II narrative in which Churchill was an improvement on Chamberlain only in that he wasn’t an appeaser, de Gaulle was worse than both of them put together, the Allied leaders all cordially loathed each other, half the British public wanted to sue for peace, and there was across-the-board mutual dislike between London civilians and American troops (and British dismay at the way African-American troops were treated by their white counterparts was far from universal). Do I exaggerate? Only slightly. Backs to the Wall is a sort of distant, city-specific pre-echo of Juliet Gardner’s sour 2004 book Wartime: Britain, 1939-45.

As with Wartime, however, this book does have the virtue of introducing us to a number of very interesting people. I became interested in reading it because it brought Vere Hodgson’s wartime diary to public attention. Mosley quotes or paraphrases Hodgson’s writing from the beginning of the war through its end, and also seems to have interviewed her extensively. His primary villain, meanwhile, is not Chamberlain but Chamberlain’s chief acolyte, Henry “Chips” Channon, from whose diary he quotes widely (and who turns out to have been born and raised in the United States, to my surprise). We hear a great deal from the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow and follow the misadventures of two civilians, Jenny Martin and Polly Wright, whose consistency in both bad luck and bad choices meant that neither of them was able to stay out of serious trouble for any length of time.

There are many glimpses of the London home front through the eyes of two boys, both eight when the war began: John Hardiman, of Canning Town and later of Aldgate, who was evacuated in 1939 but soon returned to London, and Donald Ketley of Chadwell Heath, who was never evacuated at all. Donald, who thoroughly enjoyed himself during the war, had an experience that speaks to our own recent reality:

Another good thing: quite early in the Blitz, his school had been totally destroyed by a bomb. Since Donald was shy, a poor student and unpopular with his teacher, he was overjoyed when he heard the place was gone. Thereafter he went each day to his teacher’s home to pick up lessons, which he brought back the next day for marking. In the following months he changed from a poor student to an excellent one, and although he was aware that his teacher rather resented it, he didn’t care. 

Mosley also introduces us to Archibald McIndoe, the real-life counterpart of Patrick Jamieson, Bill Patterson’s character in the Foyle’s War episode ‘Enemy Fire.’ Art seems to have imitated life pretty accurately in that instance: he and his burn hospital in East Grinstead were apparently exactly like what was depicted, the only difference being that the hospital was set up in an existing hospital building, not in a requisitioned stately home.

Backs to the Wall seems to have been one of the earliest books to make substantial use of Mass-Observation writings. Most M-O diaries are anonymous, but there are two named diarists here who stand out. John James Donald was a committed pacifist whose air of lofty detachment as he observes the reactions of those around him to air-raids and other wartime event and prepares for his tribunal — which, in the end, he decides not to attend — quickly grows irritating. More interesting is Rosemary Black, a 28-year-old widow, in no small part because she differs markedly from what I had thought of as the archetypical M-O writer. Here’s her self-description on M-O documents: “Upper-middle-class; mother of two children (girls aged 3 and 2); of independent means.” Mosley continues:

She lived in a trim three-story house in a quiet street of the fashionable part of Maida Vale, a short taxi ride from the center of the West End, whose restaurants and theatres she knew well. She was chic and attractive, and lacked very few of the niceties of life: there was Irene, a Hungarian refugee, to look after the children; Helen, a Scottish maid, to look after herself and the house; and a daily cleaning woman to do the major chores.

Black took her children out of London at the beginning of the war but quickly brought them back, and when bombs began falling she kept them in place — air raids might be disruptive for them, but apparently relocation had been worse. She was very much aware that she was riding out the war in a position of privilege, and she often expressed guilt feelings; but this tended to fade away before her irritation at the dominance of “the muddling amateur or the soulless bureaucrat” in the war effort. Offering her services, even as a volunteer, proved very frustrating. “She was young, strong and willing; she typed, spoke languages, was an expert driver and had taken a course in first aid,” Mosley tells us, “but finding a job even as a chauffeur was proving difficult” in September 1940. (She actually wasn’t all that strong physically: as we learn, she suffered from rheumatism which grew worse during the war years and probably affected her outlook.)

Black was greeted with “apathy and indifference” by both A.R.P. and the Women’s Voluntary Service. Early in 1941 she was finally able to get a place handing out tea, sandwiches, cake, and so on to rescue and clean-up workers at bomb sites from a Y.M.C.A. mobile canteen. She was a bit intimidated by the women with whom she found herself working:

Their class is right up to the county family level. Nearly everyone is tall above the average and remarkably hefty, even definitely large, not necessarily fat but broad and brawny. Perhaps this is something to do with the survival of the fittest.

And the work did bring her some satisfaction, even if it was of the type that lent itself to being recorded with tongue placed firmly in cheek:

We had a pleasant and uneventful day’s work serving City fire sites, the General Post Office, demolition workers and Home Guard Stations, etc. We were complimented at least half a dozen times on the quality of our tea ... I think the provision of saccharine for the tea urns to compensate for the mean sugar allowance is my most successful piece of war work. What did you do in the Great War, Mummy? Sneaked pills into the tea urns, darling.

For all her good humor and astute observations, Mrs. Black was far from immune to tiny-mindedness. After an evening out in 1943 she wrote:

I had to wait some time for the others in the cinema foyer, and I was much struck, as often before, by the almost complete absence of English people these days, from the capital of England. Almost every person who came in was either a foreigner, a roaring Jew, or both. The Cumberland [Hotel] has always been a complete New Jerusalem, but this evening it really struck me as no worse than anywhere else! It is really dismaying to see that this should be the result of this war in defence of our country.

Indeed, Mosley cites the results of a multi-year Mass-Observation study that showed a marked increase in anti-Jewish views London’s general population over the course of the war. Since it’s just one study, and since I haven’t seen that study mentioned anywhere else, I am reluctant to trust blindly in its accuracy; and there’s also this:

The small flat which George [Hardiman] had procured for [his family] ... in Aldgate was cleaner and airier than the old house in Canning Town [which had been bombed], and the little Jewish children with whom John now went to school seemed to be cleaner than the ones in Elm Road; at any rate, he no longer came home with nits in his hair.

On the other hand, Mosley himself gives us only a fragmentary view of London’s wartime Jewish population: everyone seems to be either a terrified refugee or an impoverished East Ender. We hear nothing about the substantial middle- and upper-middle class population — mostly of German descent and in some cases German birth — that had already taken shape in Northwest London; and while we are briefly introduced to Sir David Waley, a Treasury official, in connection with the case of an interned Jewish refugee, we aren’t told that Waley himself was Jewish, a member of “the cousinhood.” On yet a third hand, Mosley also quotes other M-O surveys from the same period that indicate largely hostile attitudes to most foreigners in London, with Poles at the bottom of the ladder and the small Dutch contingent on top. (Incidentally, the book’s extremely patchy index identifies Vere Hodgson as a Mass-Observation diarist, which she wasn’t.)

Backs to the Wall closes with a very brief, remarkably non-partisan account of the 1945 general election and its immediate aftermath. “Neither side had any inkling of the way the minds of the British voters were turning,” he writes.

When [Churchill’s] friends suggested that he was a victim of base ingratitude, he shook his head. He would not have such a charge leveled against his beloved countrymen. Ingratitude? "Oh, no," he said quietly, "I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time."

The book is worth reading for the primary materials that it includes, but it probably tells us as much about the era in which it was written as about the period that it covers.  

[psychosistr]

FOWL Agent “Bokor Baron”

Art by @thefriendlyfour​ , full bio below the cut:

Physical Description: An extremely tall and buff eastern redtail hawk (otherwise known as a chicken hawk) with a physique that leaves him an inch or two larger than even the likes of Steelbeak. Mostly white feathers on the front of his body with a spotted-band of dark feathers across his broad chest, brown feathers along his back, hands, and the upper half of his head (from his beak up) with the typical speckled markings along his back and arms, and his breed’s namesake red tail feathers.His eyes are a bit odd for his species, though, with black rings around them and an intense red color that’s so vibrant it’s practically glowing (given his powers, though, it might actually be glowing for real…). Has dark brown hair/head feathers woven together in a way similar to cornrows that end at the middle of his neck.

Outfit: Wears a loose-fitting blood red top with a lighter red interior (though the actual colors can change depending on what spirits and/or deities he’s invoking) and a large black collar- typically keeps the chest part opened fairly wide to show off his strong torso and the sleeves rolled up around the elbows to do the same for his arms; has a large pocket on the right side that he reserves for small charms. Keeps his shirt tied closed with a dark purple and black striped sash which is also used for holding various larger dolls and charms as well as a well-worn brown leather pouch with a black bird-skull motif on his back-right side that holds his most powerful and dangerous charms and amulets. Pants are black leather with a purple band around the hips, but the purple part is rarely seen with how far down his top normally hangs. Accessories include a black leather-cord necklace with a circular black metallic pendant emblazoned with a white veve for one of his primary deities, several beaded bracelets on his left wrist (in black, red, white, purple, and alternating combinations of the colors), and a hat that at first looks like a rather flat black cap but is actually a collapsible top hat with a dark purple band holding a few red flowers and small bird skulls along the brim. Typically forgoes shoes and just walks around with his talons exposed.

Gender: Male.

Sexual Orientation: Pansexual and very upfront about what catches his eye.

Age: 32

Nicknames: The Baron, The Bokor, Big Red, Redtail, and Henry.

The last one is Steelbeak’s name for him and a purposeful mispronunciation of his real name rather than a nickname.

Real Name:Henri Vivant

First name is pronounced “on-ree”.

Background:

Little Henri grew up in New Orleans as part of a long-line of Louisiana Voodoo practitioners, spending most of his childhood in a small house with his grandmother and five older siblings.

From the first time he mentioned being able to see the ghosts and spirits around him, he was taught the names of the spirits and deities to call on to help himself and others as well as the proper rituals to summon them when necessary. Kids outside of his family would tease and bully him for talking to “imaginary friends”, as they would put it, but he enjoyed the looks of terror on their faces once he learned how to invoke spirits and allow them to possess his body- revenge was something he GREATLY enjoyed.

Over time, Henri’s viewpoints began to differ from those of his family: Instead of wanting to use his abilities to help people, he wanted to use them to gain power and recognition. Instead of the more benevolent spirits and deities his family formed connections with, he sought out the more powerful and destructive ones. Instead of a simple life as a houngan, he wanted the dark powers of a bokor.

Needless to say, his family was very disappointed with his choices in life and all but disowned him by the time he was old enough to move out on his own. It didn’t take long after that for him to start using his powers to commit crimes and earn the attention of FOWL- he accepted their invitation and became a full agent at age 28.

Was partnered with Steelbeak about two years ago and to this day is still considered by the chief officer to be one of the WORST partners he’s ever had. It wasn’t hard for Steelbeak to figure out Henri, by then dubbed “The Bokor Baron”, was a two-faced snake in the grass who wanted the chief officer title and the power that came with it, even if it meant killing the current chief officer to do so. Their partnership lasted two and a half weeks before High Command finally agreed to Steelbeak’s numerous requests for a different partner.

Current Position: Active field agent for FOWL, he’s often called in to deal with more supernatural related missions (ancient magical artifacts, getting information from deceased individuals, clearing spirits out of FOWL facilities, etc.).

Personality:

Henri will act suave, gentlemanly, and cordial to anyone upon first meeting them, winning over most people almost instantly as if they are mysteriously compelled to like him…

The truth is, though, that this side of him is just an act to win people over. One of the charms he carries with him at all times increases his natural charisma and desirability to those who fall for his gentlemanly demeanor- once it takes effect, individuals under its sway will almost always be inclined to side with him during disputes, take his advice to heart, and, for those attracted to men, more often than not they end up adoring him to the point of a sort of pseudo-infatuation.

Those with a naturally higher tolerance against magic or attunement to the spiritual realms have shown resistance or even immunity to this effect. Other than the natural immunity, the only ones who aren’t affected by his charm are those who have a chance to know what he’s really like before his gentlemanly act can fool them.

To-date there are less than 10 people in all of FOWL who’ve proven immune to his charms, with High Command and Steelbeak being four of them.

Deep down, his real personality is manipulative, greedy, and power-hungry. He wants to be considered the best in whatever field he is a part of, and FOWL is no exception.

Should be noted that he does have a bit of a temper problem when things don’t go his way, often leading to him losing his composure and slipping into his much thicker New Orleans accent while cursing and throwing a fit.

Steelbeak is extremely good at provoking this reaction out of his ex-partner and does so with glee, despite it causing anyone under the other man’s charms to see Steelbeak as a horrible person for angering Henri in the first place- he doesn’t care, though, it’s totally worth it to see him blow up and lose his cool.

Interesting Bonus Facts:

Can speak both English and French fluently, and will often pretend to be French when first meeting someone to help with his gentlemanly illusion.

While he predominantly uses Louisiana style voodoo, Henri is also well-versed in hoodoo, mainly practicing it for the materials and charms that can be made from the practice.

Has cigars and rum on him at all times. The cigars are strictly for his invocations, as is the rum, but he’ll occasionally take a swig of the rum when he’s so inclined.

Can sing and dance really well, both for the sake of his rituals and invocations, and just for fun.

He’ll never admit it out loud, but his favorite song is “La Vie En Rose” because his grandmother used to sing it to him when he was little. He knows it in both English and French and will sometimes sing it when he’s stressed or having trouble sleeping

IF he ever lets someone get close enough to let his guard down around them, he might sing it for them occasionally.

Although he’ll swear up and down that he adores the way those charmed by his spells fawn over him, in reality he finds them boring and weak and could never fall for someone so simple-minded.

His ideal romantic interest would be someone with a strong enough mind and spirit to resist his charming magic, who’s assertive enough to put him in his place when he acts up without trying to “steal his spotlight”, and could see ghosts and spirits like he can so they would never think he was crazy for talking to himself.

[gstqaobc]

The Royal Fascinator Friday, May 01, 2020 Hello, royal watchers and all those intrigued by what’s going on inside the House of Windsor. This is your biweekly dose of royal news and analysis. Reading this online? Sign up here to get this delivered to your inbox. Janet Davison Janet Davison Royal Expert

Sophie: The royal who ‘just gets on with it

She has been packing groceries in recent days, volunteering at a kitchen and talking to paramedics. There hasn’t been much fanfare around her actions in support of those working in the battle against COVID-19 — but then again, when Sophie, Countess of Wessex, does her royal business, that’s the way it tends to be. “Sophie does everything very quietly, partly because the media don’t follow her obsessively as they do with William and Catherine and partly because the things she does aren’t necessarily very glamorous,” said Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, via email. That’s exactly what the Royal Family needs, Seward suggests: “someone who just gets on with things regardless of the attention they receive.” Seward likens Sophie, who joined the Royal Family when she married the Queen’s youngest son, Prince Edward, in 1999, to her sister-in-law, Princess Anne. Seward said given that Anne is nearly 70, she thinks Sophie “will take over from her as being the hardest-working royal. [Sophie] approaches her role in an unfussy way and just gets on with it.” That low-key approach has not gone unnoticed by her mother-in-law. Sophie “goes about her duty diligently, quietly and without a great deal of fuss, and for that the Queen adores her,” said Vanity Fair’s royal correspondent, Katie Nicholl, via email. “They are very close and spend a lot of time together when they are in Windsor, and the Queen loves riding with her grandchildren James and Louise.” It’s a closeness observers say goes back years. Sophie’s arrival in the family came in the wake — and in some ways the shadow — of Diana, wife of Edward’s older brother Prince Charles. Some saw Sophie as a new Diana, Seward said, “which of course she wasn’t.” “She hated the comparison as she knew she never would or should try to live up to it.” Louise's birth in November 2003 was difficult, as Sophie almost died as a result of blood loss. “People saw how much the Queen cared about her, visiting her in hospital, which is unheard of,” Seward said. “Gradually and without being pushy, she became the Queen’s closest companion — they share a love of military history and a wicked sense of humour.” That’s not to say it’s all been smooth sailing for Sophie. After her marriage, she continued in her career, but quit as head of a public relations company in 2001 after embarrassing comments she made were secretly recorded by a tabloid reporter posing as an Arab sheik and published in the News of the World. Seward suggests the Queen remained supportive of her daughter-in-law, and ultimately decided it would be better if Sophie and Edward worked as full-time royals. “Ever since then, Sophie has appeared looking glamorous when needed and workmanlike when needed.” She has visited Canada several times, sometimes with Prince Edward, sometimes on her own. The last visit came last fall, with two low-profile days in Toronto. Much of the time was spent at Toronto Western and Toronto General hospitals. She talked with critically ill patients and showed a "great warmth" and a "real, genuine skill in listening," Kevin Smith, president and chief executive officer of the University Health Network, said at the time. With turmoil and uncertainty in the upper echeolons of the Royal Family these days —  Prince Harry and Meghan stepping back to seek their independence, Prince Andrew stepping back amid controversy over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — questions have arisen over just how the House of Windsor will approach the future. Some suggest Sophie will find herself in a more prominent role. “We are already seeing Edward and Sophie doing more to support the royals and I think that’s going to be the case moving forward,” said Nicholl.

Royal birthdays — pandemic-style

T(The Duchess of Cambridge/Kensington Palace via AP)In any family, birthdays can come in bunches. For the Royal Family, there’s a real run of them in late April and early May. And this year, the pandemic has been reflected as some members of the family marked their annual milestones in recent days. Queen Elizabeth's 94th birthday was acknowledged more quietly than usual. The gun salutes that normally sound on April 21 were called off, with the Queen feeling they would not be appropriate at this time. Photos released to mark Prince Louis’s second birthday on April 23, taken by his mother, Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, showed the happy, colourful and messy aftermath of fingerpainting rainbows in support of the National Health Service. Other birthdays right around now include Louis’s sister Charlotte, who turns five on May 2, and their cousin, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, who will be one on May 6.

Harry and Meghan and the media —  again

Prince Harry and Meghan may be looking for a new life in Los Angeles, but some old issues appear to remain top of mind for them.The couple, who stepped back from the upper echelons of the Royal Family a month ago, caught observers somewhat off-guard the other day when they sent out a message saying they would no longer be co-operating with four British tabloid newspapers.It prompted some to wonder about the timing of the announcement, coming as it did during the pandemic, when such an issue might take a back seat to concerns over how to battle the coronavirus.Harry in particular has had a raucous relationship with the media, and the couple has also taken their battle into the courts.A few days ago, the first court hearing in a privacy case brought by Meghan against a tabloid for printing part of a letter to her father began at the High Court in London.Papers submitted in court included details of text messages Harry sent to Meghan’s father.The whole media swirl prompted Jonny Dymond, the BBC’s royal correspondent, to ask, “So will the real Duke and Duchess of Sussex please stand up?“There is the couple who provoke such sympathy in the court papers published today,” Dymond wrote recently. “And there's the couple who think now is the right time to exercise their quarrels with the bestselling papers of the nation that they have departed from.”

“Royally quotable“

As we approach World Immunization Week, I wanted to recognize the vital and urgent work being done by so many to tackle the pandemic; by those in the medical and scientific professions, at universities and research institutions, all united in working to protect us from COVID-19.”— 

The pandemic prompted Prince Philip to make a rare public statement on April 20. The 98-year-old Duke of Edinburgh, who has had a keen interest in science, has rarely been seen in public since he retired from public duties in the summer of 2017.

Royals in Canada

(Bill Croke/The Canadian Press)Princess Anne has been having something of a moment lately — or maybe several moments. One came late last fall, prompted by the feisty portrayal of her in Season 3 of the Netflix drama The Crown. And right now, the all-business, no-nonsense only daughter of the Queen and Prince Philip is the cover story for Vanity Fair.

But rewind 49 years, and Anne had her share of moments, too, some of them coming in Canada.

Much media attention was focused on the 20-year-old when she arrived with her parents to mark the 100th anniversary of British Columbia’s entry into Confederation.

As much as Anne was the focus of anticipation and attention during that trip in early May 1971, her royal duties were rather routine, even a bit mundane.

“Princess Anne made no official statement at the unveiling,” the Globe and Mail reported on May 5, after she officially opened Canada’s newest national park, Pacific Rim on Vancouver Island. “Her only function was to pull the cord that removed the flag from the rock face to unveil the plaque.”

Later, the Globe reported, Anne told the park superintendent “she was much impressed by the beauty and the picturesqueness of the park region.”

Our friends at CBC Archives have taken an in-depth look at the tour that took the royal visitors to Victoria, Vancouver, Kelowna, Vernon, Penticton, Williams Lake and Comox.

Royal reads 1.Prince Harry has told friends he misses his life in the Armed Forces. [Daily Telegraph]

2. Harry has also looked back on his time as a child, recording a special messageto celebrate the 75th anniversary of a book he and others loved in their younger years: Thomas the Tank Engine. [CBC

]3. King Henry VIII might not be the first person you think of as inspiration for how to live in self-isolation, but maybe he could offer some lessons on how to find comfort in quarantine. [The Guardian]Cheers!I’m always happy to hear from you. Send your ideas, comments, feedback and notes to royalfascinator@cbc.ca. Problems with the newsletter? Please let me know about any typos, errors or glitches.

[jaytheredbird]

🌞 and 💫 for the ask meme! :D

🌞 Do you have one canon character you love that not many have heard of? What do you like most about them?

@javechan_

Hmm I don't know if he's a lesser known character or if I 'love' him, but from a purely character design perspective: I liked Dane of Elysium (Earth-11) because DC chose to put him in a skirt instead of pants :B. I did not like his personality/characterization that much but I appreciated that DC designed a male version of Wonder Woman & stayed true to the actual WW costume, unlike Wonderous Man (Earth-11).

@wajjs

I do! He's from a kind of forgotten Elseworlds comic, Thomas 'Tom' Wayne aka Robin 3000. But actually, I also like Moon and Aki from those same comics. I think what drives me to them is the potential they all have as characters, plus the good stories that could come from Tom being the last of the Waynes and the last of the Robins. Moon is a very sweet and innocent character, and Aki is very loyal but also very human.

@glaciya

I really want to have an answer for this but I cannot for the life of me think of a decent or relevant one Dx

@spartanbunjess

Henry Adams from the Arkham Knight game. He manages to convince Bruce and Tim that he’s immune to Joker’s infection which leads to them losing control of Panessa Studios for a time. Plus he manages to get Harley to work with him before he’s even captured by Batman showing just how calculating he can be.

@firefrightfic

At first I was struggling to think how to answer this because pretty much all of my favourite DC characters are pretty well known already, but then I remembered the Sandman Universe stories I've been reading, House of Whispers and The Dreaming. HoW focuses heavily on an Hoodoo goddess called Erzulie, who is triple natured, big and beautiful, and has three husbands who adore her! She's also a certified badass who cares deeply for her charges and husbands and goes through some real challenges over the course of the story to keep them safe.

Meanwhile in The Dreaming, you have Dora, a monstess woman searching for her true identity, who is brash and brazen and unapologetic, and I really love her design and personality. Both need some more love from fans

💫 If you could make the crossover teamup of your dreams happen, which characters would you have working together?

@javechan_

I don't have enough comic knowledge to answer this. But, I have occasionally entertained thoughts about a team-up between Deadpool & Red Hood because I think the banter between the two would be interesting.

@wajjs

I'd actually really like a crossover between Spiderman (Peter Parker) and Nightwing (Dick), but! with adult Peter and not his teen self. Their dynamic could be very interesting and I think they have quite a few things in common when it comes to how they approach crime fighting. And Peter already has a crossover with Bruce, so I don't see why this can't happen.

@glaciya

Oh Wade Wilson and Jason Todd for sure! They are two of my favorite fictional characters and I feel like they have the potential to bring out both the worst and the best in each other depending on the situation. Both are two dudes that have been through lots of hardship(including torture and death) but both of them have kept their hearts throughout it all. I think the want to be the ideal hero and the need to ruthlessly kill all evil is at war in both of their minds and they could definitely bond over those conflicting feelings and their previous experiences. 10/10 for two wonderful men with bloody pasts not afraid to Get Shit Done.

@spartanbunjess

If I could make any crossover happen it’d be with Blue Team (Halo), Tom and Lucy (also Halo) and the five Outlaws. It’d be interesting to see how much of a headache they’d give Fred-104 as he is the unofficial dad of Blue Team. Master Chief John-117 would be excellent with Jason as his planning seems to be ‘save as many people as possible no matter the risk to myself’ and he understands the difference between spending lives and wasting lives. Kelly-087 is like Halo’s version of a speedster and id love to see how quick she’d be with access to the speed force. Jason deserves to have his own speedster and she’d be excellent at it. Especially as she’s known for flipping off the enemy and just generally winding them up/snarking at them. The Outlaws would be excellent parents to Tom and Lucy. They’ve been through so much trauma that Jason et al would be best suited to helping them heal and find ways to cope. They need that family atmosphere to flourish. Plus every member is badass. Linda-058 would take both Roy and Jason in a shooting competition and Floyd/Slade would pale in comparison to her.

@bloodthirstymerc

A lot of crossovers come to mind, but my favourite that involves DC would have to be the Teen Titans with the Young Avengers. My main reasoning might be a little controversial and biased, but my boyfriend and I both love TimKon and Wickling and often talk about them meeting and it very quickly became a fave of mine with the four of them together. But I think that all members of both teams would find little factors about each other that they'd get along with.

(I also think that Roy Harper and Clint Barton would have a blast together, obvious reasons why that pairing would be a good idea aside. They're both just messes that I adore wholeheartedly.)

(And wouldn't object to Wade Wilson (Deadpool) meeting up with a vast majority of DC characters either.)

@firefrightfic

Bucky Barnes and Jason Todd. Both have similar elements in their stories. Both are former sidekicks who died and struggled to find their way in the world after, out of the shadow of their mentors. I think they'd be really interesting together!

I'd also adore a series where Deathstroke and Deadshot are forced to work together long term. There'd be so much snide commenting and bullying, and also I'd love comparisons of Floyd as a villainous parent to Slade's... uh... practices. It'd be great fun.

[phroyd]

http://phroyd.tumblr.comU.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

The advisories being relayed by U.S. spy agencies were part of a broader collection of worrisome signals that came during a period now regarded by many public health officials and other experts as a squandered opportunity to contain the outbreak.

As of Monday, more than 55,000 people in the United States had died of covid-19.

The frequency with which the coronavirus was mentioned in the PDB has not been previously reported, and U.S. officials said it reflected a level of attention comparable to periods when analysts have been tracking active terrorism threats, overseas conflicts or other rapidly developing security issues.

A White House spokesman disputed the characterization that Trump was slow to respond to the virus threat. “President Trump rose to fight this crisis head-on by taking early, aggressive historic action to protect the health, wealth and well-being of the American people,” said spokesman Hogan Gidley. “We will get through this difficult time and defeat this virus because of his decisive leadership.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is responsible for the PDB. In response to questions about the repeated mentions of coronavirus, a DNI official said, “The detail of this is not true.” The official declined to explain or elaborate.

U.S. officials emphasized that the PDB references to the virus included comprehensive articles on aspects of the global outbreak, but also smaller digest items meant to keep Trump and senior administration officials updated on the course of the contagion. Versions of the PDB are also shared with Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking U.S. officials.

One official said that by mid- to late January the coronavirus was being mentioned more frequently, either as one of the report’s core articles or in what is known as an “executive update,” and that it was almost certainly called to Trump’s attention orally.

The administration’s first major step to arrest the spread of the virus came in late January, when Trump restricted travel between the United States and China, where the virus is believed to have originated late last year.

But Trump spent much of February publicly playing down the threat while his administration failed to mobilize for a major outbreak by securing supplies of protective equipment, developing an effective diagnostic test and preparing plans to quarantine large portions of the population.

The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

Trump insisted publicly on Feb. 26 that the number of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” and said the next day that “it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

In reality, the virus was by then moving swiftly through communities across the United States, spreading virtually unchecked in New York City and other population centers until state governors began imposing sweeping lockdowns, requiring social distancing and all but closing huge sectors of the country’s economy.

As late as March 10, Trump said: “Just stay calm. It will go away.” The next day, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic.

By then, officials said, the warnings in the PDB and other intelligence reports had taken on the aspect of an insistent drumbeat. The first mention of the coronavirus in the PDB came at the beginning of January, focusing on what at that point were troubling signs of a new virus spreading through the Chinese city of Wuhan, and the Chinese government’s apparent efforts to conceal details of the outbreak.

In the ensuing weeks, U.S. intelligence agencies devoted additional resources and departments to tracking the spread of the coronavirus. At the CIA, the effort involved agency centers on China, Europe and Latin America, as well as departments de­voted to transnational health threats, officials said.The preliminary intelligence on the coronavirus was fragmentary, and did not address the prospects of a severe outbreak in the United States.

U.S. intelligence officials, citing scientific evidence, have largely dismissed the notion that the virus was deliberately genetically engineered. But they are continuing to examine whether the virus somehow escaped a virology lab in Wuhan, where research on naturally occurring coronaviruses has been conducted.

“We’re looking at it very closely, but we just don’t know,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official.

The warnings conveyed in the PDB probably will be a focus of any future investigation of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in early April called for the formation of an independent commission analogous to the one created to investigate the Sept, 11, 2001, attacks.

In response to that probe, the George W. Bush administration was pressured to declassify portions of the PDB from August 2001 — a month before 9/11 — warning that al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was “determined to strike in U.S.”

Senior officials with direct knowledge of Trump’s intelligence briefings say that Trump listens and asks questions during the sessions. “We go in and he treats us with respect,” one senior official said.

But Trump has also been combative or dismissive toward U.S. intelligence agencies throughout his presidency.

In mid-February, as the pathogen was spreading, Trump fired acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire after learning that a senior analyst had briefed members of Congress that Russia was seeking to interfere in the 2020 presidential election and had “developed a preference” for Trump.

Officials have noted that Trump was also contending with the Senate impeachment trial in January and focused on other security issues, including tracking Iran’s response to a Jan. 3 U.S. airstrike that killed a top Iranian commander, Qasem Soleimani, in Baghdad.

David Priess, a former CIA officer who was a PDB briefer in the George W. Bush administration, said that even if Trump is ignoring his briefing book, other officials including national security adviser Robert O’Brien are probably digesting the material and interacting with Trump daily.

O’Brien’s deputy, Matthew Pottinger, has a background in intelligence and was among a small circle of senior officials urging early action to contain the coronavirus, U.S. officials said. Pottinger pushed to close off air travel from Europe in February, officials said, but Trump did not do so until mid-March.

“The fact that [Trump] gets only two or three briefings a week from the intelligence professionals doesn’t mean that’s the only exposure to the PDB he’s getting,” Priess said. “He can get the best intelligence in the world and still not make good decisions based on it.”

Priess, author of a book on intelligence briefings for presidents, said that Trump’s predecessors have been varied in their approaches to consuming intelligence. President Barack Obama was considered an avid reader of “the book,” which was prepared for him on a specially equipped computer tablet. President George W. Bush reviewed the highlights of the PDB and often discussed its contents at length with his briefer. President Richard M. Nixon likely didn’t read the PDB, Priess said, but was extensively briefed by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.

Trump’s top health officials and advisers were also delivering warnings on the coronavirus through January and February, though their messages at times appeared muddled and contradictory.

On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned publicly that virus was spreading so rapidly that “we need to be prepared for significant disruption in our lives.”

Trump, traveling in India at the time, was outraged by what he regarded as the alarmist tone of her remarks and their perceived impact on the U.S. stock market.

Two days later, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar testified before a Congressional committee that the risk to the public remained “low,” and that the coronavirus would “look and feel to the American people more like a severe flu season in terms of the interventions and approaches you will see.”

On March 11, with cases surging in New York and the stock market plummeting, Trump declared a national emergency and announced a ban on travel from Europe, which had become the new epicenter of the outbreak.

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Phroyd

[okimargarvez]

LUCKY IN LOVE

Original title: Lucky in love.

Prompt: BAU team and their partners play golf.

Warning: none.

Genre: family, funny, romantic.

Characters: Penelope Garcia, Luke Alvez, David Rossi, Krystall Richards, Emily Prentiss, Andrew Mendoza, Jennifer Jareau, Will Lamontagne, Spencer Reid, Tara Lewis, Matt Simmons, Kristy Simmons, Phil Brooks, O.C.

Pairing: Garvez, RossixKrystall, Prendoza, Willifer, MattxKristy, PhilxO.C.

Note: part 66 in Garvez canon Life.

Legend: 💑😘🔦🎈.

Song mentioned: none.

GARVEZ STORIES

LUCKY IN LOVE

 -Do you know what I like about minigolf?- he helps her get out of the car and then checks two or three times to have it closed properly. Some paranoia will follow him forever. Penelope shakes her head, peering at him with that searching look that he finds extremely intriguing. -You'll see soon.- he says, bringing her closer and moving his fingers over her waist. -My arms on your body, hands on your hips, me behind you, in public, while I guide you...- Luke's voice is extremely adept at evoking those images, so much so that the woman makes a considerable effort to keep a little moan.

-I have to expect it was something like that.- she exclaims, pretending to be annoyed. In the meantime, they have reached the entrance. Some couples have already arrived. -From how you talk, you must have already tried this experience with another woman.- she throws it there, randomly. After practically two years of relationship, she doesn't know almost anything about Luke's previous relationships and it's quite strange. She is convinced that she is able to manage this without falling prey to useless depressions or inferiority crises.

-Yes.- the man nods, turning to look at her directly, as he moves his hand to meet hers, the serious expression.

Penelope feels trembling in her guts. -Who?- she asks, sensing that this is an important person for Luke. And indeed, she is right.

-Phil.- he simply answers, continuing to appear serious.

-What?- but she can't do it, and she bursts into a series of giggles that also cause her to cough. Luke holds the gate open for her and takes the opportunity to take a good look at her waddling ass. He will never tire of some things.

-What is there to laugh about?- he then asks, showing himself almost offended.

And he gets the desired result. -On, don't be mad...- she says, before grabbing his face to place a sweet kiss on the lips of the boyfriend, indifferent to the presence of spectators.

-Luke, Penelope, come here!- Rossi's authoritative voice calls them. -Stop kissing like two teenagers in heat!- Krystall, standing next to him, nudges him slightly.

-We have become a stereotype, now.- Penelope whispers, in a moment of respite.

- In what sense?- Luke doesn't seem particularly interested in the answer.

-Well, we can never keep our hands away from each other.- she explains, kissing him back again and digging her fingers into his hair.

-My hands are now far away from you…- he points out, getting a little push.

-Shut up!- she says a little too loudly, as they walk the last few meters that separate them from the rest of the group. Only Matt and Kristy are missing.

-Statistically, in USA children have been conceived in cars parked outside public places more than in the beds of the houses.- Spencer exclaims, watching the passionate couple exchange some effusion again.

-And where would you have read this?- asks his best friend, throwing a fleeting and embarrassed glance at her husband, who reciprocates.

-Why you blush like that?- Emily immediately notices that change of tone. -Will, don't tell me that Henry too...- he winks, seeing JJ turn even redder and glare at Dr. Reid. Then both burst out laughing and the blonde just shruggs her shoulders, neither confirming nor excluding this possibility.

Someone grabs the chief of the BAU by the hips. Emily feels herself being dragged against a solid but at the same time welcoming chest; her nostrils are filled with that perfume that has become practically a drug. -Em, I'd say it would be better off if you would concentrated on the game.- Andrew whispers with his warm voice, causing a thousand shivers down her spine. -My grandfather had been carrying me on the green since I was three, so I don't intend to repeat the figure made at the bowling alley.- he adds, but she is not paying much attention to the content of his words. -That time we joked, but tonight we get serious.- the brunette opens her eyes wide, realizing, if Andrew had been another man, the way she would have answered him. And instead with him...

-Andrew... wow.- she can only say. -I didn't think you were so...- she still has no words. -But strangely I like it.- he seems to appreciate her answer and he abducts her in a short kiss. Another thing she didn't think she would ever do in front of her friends, her family. Not a reserved person as she is.

-Here, another two lovebirds.- Tara says, puffing. -There must be a strange virus around, I've never seen Prentiss like this...- a red spot almost makes her a heart attack. She will also be a physiotherapist and not a federal agent, but she has the same ability to move silently as a feline.

-Yes, Dr. Lewis, that virus is called falling in love, and you'll see that sooner or later it will hit you, too!- Samantha seems pleased to have succeeded in upsetting her. Tara shakes her head, but the shadow of a smile is visible on her lips. -You're not immune.- she points out. -Uuuuuh!- then she imitates the verse of a ghost from an early horror movie.

-Sammie, darling, you always have to be so much... yourself?- asks her boyfriend, now standing without the use of crutches, but still not quite strong on his own legs.

-Don't you love me for this?- the woman asks innocently.

-If the children have finished, I would say that we could also start.- the strong voice of the oldest man resounds again. -We only paid it for two hours.- he remembers to all, but every couple seems to be interested in other kind of activities. He looks up at the sky.

A hand wraps around his arm. -Come on, dear, you talk like an old man.- Krystall says, managing to make him giggle.

-But I am old.- he replies, avoiding at least to say that both are no longer so young. His wife just keeps looking at him. -And that's okay.- the man gives up.

Behind them they hear the noise of the gate being opened. -Excuse the delay, Kristy had a bit of nausea and... - Matt hardly has time to explain that almost all the women present start shouting and jumping for joy.

Penelope, JJ, Emily and Tara speak simultaneously. -Don't tell me!- Kristy just moves her head up and down. -Aaaaaah!- the men exchange meaningful glances, before congratulating in turn with the future father for the fifth time. The wheel of fortune doesn’t seem to turn for Matt and Kristy, who are ranked in last place, not very sorry; Phil and Sammie are beaten by JJ and Will for just 2 more points; Rossi and Krystall put themselves in fourth place, just behind Spencer and Tara, the last a little distracted by the speech of the redhead who still turns in her head; too much regret of Andrew (but not really too much, because Emily promised him a consolation prize) because Luke and Penelope win the game.

-Congratulations, boy.- says Rossi, giving him the prize: a bottle of Italian red wine. -From my parts they say: lucky in love or in the game. You have been both.-

_________________________________________

TAGS:  @arses21434 @kathy5654 @martinab26 @reidskitty13 @gracieeelizabeth27 a @thinitta   @myhollyhanna23 @garvezz @mercedes-maldonado  @shyladystudentfan @cosmicmelaninflower @criminalminds14 @pegasus-scifichick @paperwalk @fallenstarof96  @inlovewithgarvaz @the-ellen-stuff @astressedwriter @prudencerika

[kayla1993-world]

Two provinces extend mask rules, some expand access to fourth doses of COVID vaccine

Several Canadian provinces are bolstering their defences against COVID-19 amid signs of a sixth wave.

On Tuesday, Quebec and Prince Edward Island extended their provincial mask mandates until later this month as they try to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia also said they would expand access to fourth doses of COVID-19 vaccines as the National Advisory Committee on Immunization said all provinces and territories should prepare to offer the boosters.

"Preliminary data show that a second booster dose provides additional protection, including against severe disease," the committee reported.

The decisions came several days after the Public Health Agency of Canada said a resurgence of COVID-19 appears to be underway and encouraged Canadians to be vigilant to help curb spread of the latest variant.

In Quebec City, interim public health director Dr. Luc Boileau said he was extending a mask mandate until the end of April because of a rise of infections and hospitalizations across the province.

The Health Department reported a 72-patient increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations Tuesday for a total number of patients with the infection of 1,479.

"Despite everything, the situation for hospitals is under control," Boileau said.

Masking is an effective way to reduce COVID-19 transmission, said Boileau, who added that while not everyone enjoys having to wear a mask, the health order is an "acceptable restriction in the current situation."

There were 3,619 active cases of in P.E.I. and 30 people were in hospital.

P.E.I.'s chief public health officer, Dr. Heather Morrison, said masks are more effective against the virus when there is a universal requirement to wear them. Plans are moving more slowly than they had hoped.

"Masks do matter," she said. "Masks will be one of the last measures lifted."

However, P.E.I. was to end all gathering and capacity limits as of midnight Tuesday. Morrison said cases are not growing as sharply as other jurisdictions.

That they may not attribute seeing exponential growth to the gradual easing of public health measures and that masks remain mandatory in indoor public places, including schools."

Other provinces have resisted calls to reimpose public health restrictions, including mask mandates, even as cases have risen in some parts of the country.

Dr. Bonnie Henry, provincial health officer for British Columbia, said the province is in a reasonably splendid position. Transmissions, hospitalizations and deaths are all down.

She said that means it's time to move away from public health orders. The province is, however, offering a fourth dose of vaccine to seniors. That is to start with residents of long-term care and assisted-living homes and, in the coming weeks, is to include people over age 70 in the community.

Quebec said it would also expand access to fourth doses, while Ontario said it would announce a plan Wednesday to offer an additional booster to people 60 and older.

"Our medical advisers have recommended ... that we go to 60 to provide an added level of protection to the residents of Ontario," Health Minister Christine Elliott said at the provincial legislature.

Fourth doses in Ontario are already available to long-term care and retirement home residents, as well as to those who are immunocompromised.

The Ontario government's plan comes as hospitalizations there are also rising. The province reported 1,091 people in hospital with COVID-19, nearly 40 percent higher than a week ago.

Ontario ended mask mandates in most public spaces two weeks ago, except for public transit and health-care settings.

[yessadirichards]

Health

Employer vaccine mandates convert some workers, but not all

NEW YORK

Businesses that have announced vaccine mandates say some workers who had been on the fence have since gotten inoculated against COVID-19. But many holdouts remain — a likely sign of what is to come once a federal mandate goes into effect.

Even before President Joe Biden's Sept 9 announcement that companies with more than 100 workers would have to require vaccinations, dozens of companies, including Amtrak, Microsoft, United Airlines and Disney issued ultimatums to most workers. And smaller companies in New York, San Francisco and New Orleans have been required to implement mandates for customers and workers.

Some mandates seem to have converted hesitant workers. United Airlines said 97% of its workers have been vaccinated even before its deadline took effect Monday. But employers are still dealing with holdouts. Alternatives for those employees include weekly testing, working remotely or away from other staff, or ultimately, termination.

The federal mandate will cover as many as 100 million Americans — private-sector employees as well as health care workers and federal contractors. It is a high-stakes gambit by the president to boost the vaccination rate in the U.S. About 77% of American adults have had one dose of the vaccine, according to the CDC.

Akash Kapoor, founder of the Curry Up Now Indian restaurant chain, implemented a vaccination requirement for employees and customers of his location in downtown San Francisco in August. Kapoor said more than 90% of his employees are vaccinated, with one or two per store refusing. He’s making unvaccinated workers get tested twice a week.

“It lets the employees who are vaccinated feel safe,” he said.

Alejandra Segura, 28, a senior learning and development coordinator at Curry Up Now, said she was worried about having a bad reaction to the vaccine, so she held off. But the chain's vaccination mandate spurred her into action, and she received her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Sept. 20.

“It's a good thing we're required to get the vaccine, to ensure people's safety,” Segura said.

“The experience says these mandates do move the needle quite a bit on employees’ willingness to get vaccinated,” said Laura Boudreau, an assistant professor at Columbia University who studies labor issues. She believes that only a tiny fraction of employees will quit – likely those already close to retirement and who strongly distrust vaccines.

The Biden administration has said that companies will face $13,600 fines per violation and mandatory weekly testing will be the alternative to being vaccinated.

The question of whether employers or the government will pay for mandatory tests has yet to be answered. Regulations from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the office charged with implementing the mandate, will be drafted over the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases are surging in the U.S. The seven-day average COVID-19 deaths climbed above the 2,000 threshold last week for the first time since March. And this week, a number of state deadlines arrive for health care workers to get vaccinated, raising fears of worsening staff shortages in hospitals and nursing homes if some opt to quit or get fired or suspended.

A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that about 59% of remote workers favor vaccine requirements in their own workplaces, compared with 47% of those who are currently working in person. About one-quarter of workers — in person and remote — were opposed.

United’s vice president of human resources, Kirk Limacher, said that more than half of employees who were unvaccinated when the company announced the requirement on Aug. 6 have since gotten the shots. Workers must receive full vaccination by Oct. 31 but can request exemption for medical or religious reasons. If the request is denied, they have five weeks to comply with the vaccination mandate.

Pilot unions at American and Southwest are asking the Biden administration and Congress to have the option of weekly testing or showing immunity by previously contracting COVID-19. The president of the American Airlines union warned that “mass terminations” of unvaccinated pilots could cause a shortage of pilots during the December holidays. Neither American nor Southwest has said whether they will require vaccination or offer testing as an alternative.

Delta Air Lines stopped short of requiring vaccination but said that starting in November, unvaccinated workers on the company health plan will pay a $200 monthly surcharge.

Delta’s chief health officer, Dr. Henry Ting said that about 20,000 employees weren’t vaccinated when the company announced plans for the surcharge. In the past month, nearly 9,000 of them received at least one shot. About 82.5% of Delta’s 75,000 employees are fully vaccinated. Fewer than five workers have sought a medical exemption and no one has asked for a religious one, Ting said.

“The first 20,000 were very eager, and we got to about 70% (vaccinated) rather quickly,” Ting said, but the remaining unvaccinated employees “are a very different group.”

Ting said the holdouts are more likely to be Black, brown or younger than the first group. “Many of them are not anti-vaxxers,” he said. “They were on the fence, they’re scared, they want to make their own decision on their own timeline.”

Some other big companies who have announced rules requiring in-office workers be vaccinated now or in coming weeks include Google, McDonald's (U.S.-based office workers), Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs, among others.

Amtrak last week pushed back its deadline for all workers to be vaccinated by three weeks to Nov. 22. Currently about 60% of its workers have had at least one shot.

Meatpacking giant Tyson Foods, whose workforce has been hit hard by the coronavirus, is requiring all of its workers to be vaccinated by Nov. 1. About 80% of Tyson's more than 100,000 workers have received at least one dose of the vaccine, up from 50% when it announced the mandate on Aug. 3.

The company has introduced incentives for workers to get the vaccine. It's poultry division is running a lottery, once a week for five weeks, for $10,000 each week for workers who have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

New York began enforcing a vaccine mandate for certain businesses on Sept. 13. Art Depol said that about 16 of his 24 staffers at Mooyah Burgers, Fries & Shakes in Times Square were already vaccinated, three got the vaccine when it was required, and five refused.

Depol is working on setting up weekly testing for the unvaccinated workers so he can keep them on the schedule.

“It's so difficult to find good people right now, I don’t want to lose the good people I have over this."

[newstfionline]

The Worst Drug Crisis in American History

By Jessica Bruder, NY Times, July 31, 2018

DOPESICK: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America By Beth Macy Illustrated. 376 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $28.

In 2000, a doctor in the tiny town of St. Charles, Va., began writing alarmed letters to Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. The drug had come to market four years earlier and Art Van Zee had watched it ravage the state’s poorest county, where he’d practiced medicine for nearly a quarter-century. Older patients were showing up at his office with abscesses from injecting crushed-up pills. Nearly a quarter of the juniors at a local high school had reported trying the drug. Late one night, Van Zee was summoned to the hospital where a teenage girl he knew--he could still remember immunizing her as an infant--had arrived in the throes of an overdose.

Van Zee begged Purdue to investigate what was happening in Lee County and elsewhere. People were starting to die. “My fear is that these are sentinel areas, just as San Francisco and New York were in the early years of H.I.V.,” he wrote.

Since then, the worst drug crisis in America’s history--sparked by OxyContin and later broadening into heroin and fentanyl--has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, with no signs of abating. Just this spring, public health officials announced a record: The opioid epidemic had killed 45,000 people in the 12-month span that ended in September, making it almost as lethal as the AIDS crisis at its peak.

Van Zee’s prophecy and other early warnings haunt the pages of “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America,” a harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency. The third book by Beth Macy--the author, previously, of “Factory Man” and “Truevine”--is a masterwork of narrative journalism, interlacing stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference.

Macy began investigating the drug epidemic in 2012, as it seeped into the suburbs around her adopted hometown, Roanoke, Va., where she worked for 20 years as a reporter at The Roanoke Times. From there, she set out to map the local onto the national. “If I could retrace the epidemic as it shape-shifted across the spine of the Appalachians, roughly paralleling I-81 as it fanned out from the coalfields and crept north up the Shenandoah Valley, I could understand how prescription pill and heroin abuse was allowed to fester, moving quietly and stealthily across this country, cloaked in stigma and shame,” she writes.

The word “allowed” is a quiet curse. The further Macy wades into the wreckage of addiction, the more damning her indictment becomes. The opioid epidemic didn’t have to happen. It was a human-made disaster, predictable and tremendously lucrative. At every stage, powerful figures permitted its progress, waving off warnings from people like Van Zee, participating in what would become, in essence, a for-profit slaughter. Or as Macy puts it: “From a distance of almost two decades, it was easier now to see that we had invited into our country our own demise.”

Particularly grotesque is the enthusiasm with which Purdue peddled its pills. In the first five years OxyContin was on the market, total bonuses for the company’s sales staff grew from $1 million to $40 million. Zealous reps could earn quarterly bonuses as high as $100,000, one former salesperson told Macy, adding, “It behooved them to have the pill mills writing high doses.” Doctors were plied with all-expense-paid resort trips, free tanks of gas and deliveries of Christmas trees and Thanksgiving turkeys. There were even “starter coupons” offering new patients a free 30-day supply. As sales rocketed into the billions, noxious side effects began to emerge. Chief among them was the creation of a legion of addicts who, desperate to stave off withdrawal, made the leap to cheap heroin and, later, fentanyl. (“Four out of five heroin addicts come to the drugs … through prescribed opioids,” Macy notes pointedly.)

Many of the casualties have been young adults. In a poignant early scene, Macy joins a mother at the grave of her 19-year-old son. Kristi Fernandez wants to know “how Jesse went from being a high school football hunk and burly construction worker to a heroin-overdose statistic, slumped on someone else’s bathroom floor.” That question--and its larger implications--becomes an engine for the entire investigation, driving it forward with plain-spoken moral force.

In the sprawling cast of “Dopesick,” parents like Fernandez stand out. They have been galvanized by loss. Ed Bisch, an I.T. worker in Philadelphia, hadn’t even heard of OxyContin when it killed his 18-year-old son in 2001. He went on to build a message board, OxyKills.com, that became a parental support network and information clearinghouse. It attracted the attention of Lee Nuss, a grieving mother in Palm Coast, Fla., and together they started a grass-roots protest group: Relatives Against Purdue Pharma. One of the most memorable images of their work together formed during a civil trial against Purdue in Tampa, where Nuss came to a courtroom bearing the urn with her son’s ashes. Lawyers complained. The judge ordered it removed. “My son is not here in body, but he is definitely here in spirit,” Nuss told her friends. “He might have left the building, but he will be back!”

Macy introduces so many remarkable people that, midway through “Dopesick,” readers may find it challenging to keep track of them. Taken as a whole, however, this gripping book is a feat of reporting, research and synthesis. Among myriad sources, Macy cites the influence of two earlier works on the crisis: Sam Quinones’s “Dreamland,” which followed the heroin trail back to the Mexican county of Xalisco, and Barry Meier’s “Pain Killer,” published in 2003, which first brought Van Zee’s heroic work to light.

The final third of “Dopesick” is dedicated to recovery--the steep uphill climb facing former addicts and, more broadly, the nation. Here, Macy follows the struggle of Tess Henry, a former honor-roll student, athlete and poet, who tries to stay sober while raising a young son. Macy spends months driving Tess to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, charts her relationship with her mother and hopes for the best when Tess disappears, falling out of communication and into sex work.

This is the place where a traditional storytelling arc tells us to seek redemption. Macy advocates for medical-assisted therapies to help victims of the crisis and notes some pockets of progress. But the epidemic continues to grow, aided by a legal system that criminalizes victims and a health care framework that treats patients as consumers.

While Macy offers some glimmers of hope--chief among them the will of parents and advocates to keep fighting--what echoes long after one closes this book are the unsettling words of Tess Henry’s mother about her daughter: “There is no love you can throw on them, no hug big enough that will change the power of that drug.”

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“...even without inoculation, most British Army recruits would have been immune to smallpox. Studies of the British Army suggest that most men came from lower-class, labouring and low-skilled backgrounds, and especially from urban centres such as London, when other work could not be found. As the population density of these towns would have been sufficiently high to maintain endemic levels of smallpox, there was every likelihood that most British recruits would join the army immune to smallpox, having already suffered from that disease. In his military medical treatise based on observations recorded during the Seven Years War, Richard Brocklesby explained, “[i]n the army, at the beginning of the late war, I found two out of nine soldiers in the marching regiments, who, by living remote from the metropolis in country quarters, had till then escaped this disease.”

By contrast, American-born provincial soldiers would likely not have suffered from smallpox before joining regiments in the 1750s and 1760s. Not only was the population density insufficient to maintain smallpox even in the major urban centres (including New York and Boston), but quarantine measures imposed on ships ensured that outbreaks were unusual. Although the American colonies had suffered from epidemics in the 1720s most populous centres avoided outbreaks for up to 20 years at a time. As a result, provincials born during those periods would be vulnerable to smallpox, and greatly feared the disease which appeared to target them more than British regulars.

With the onset of war and the arrival of troops from Europe, smallpox broke out in the American colonies, spreading from an epidemic beginning in French Canada in 1755. Late in 1756, the Commander-in-Chief, the Earl of Loudoun reported to the Duke of Cumberland from New York:

the Small Pox is spread over, I think, the whole of this Country, except New England, from where I have not heard of it yet: It is at Albany, It is here, and it is at Philadelphia, and among the Six Nations; they got it from the French, at Niagara; and the French in Canada, had it all last Year; when it first broke out, it made a very great Alarm in the Country, but now that is over, except among the New England Men.

French officials recognized that the disease was imported to their American colonies from Europe. M. de Doreil wrote to Paris in October 1757, “[u]pon the troubles of war has supervened an epidemic disease which has been introduced by the ships that brought the soldiers. It has already committed great ravages …” 

With the movement of troops, the disease quickly spread. Montcalm, the French commander, recorded in November 1757, “La petite vérole qui n’est regardée en Canada comme une maladie populaire qui prend tous les vingt ans, fait du ravage cette année, quoiqu’on l’ait eue il y a deux ans. Elle a été communiqué par les Acadiens et les Anglois pris au fort Guillame-Henry.” The travel of Amerindians, especially along their northwest trade corridor, was held responsible for the spread of smallpox. An Amerindian was even blamed for having brought smallpox back to Britain on a transport ship. Reporting on an outbreak of smallpox among the soldiers on board a ship at Portsmouth, General Hopson told Lord Barrington:

The Woman is an Indian, was Wife to an Indian, a Soldier, turned over among others into the Royals, & who, Since He came here, died of ye Small Pox. This Woman brought the Distemper with Her from aboard one of ye Men of War. Mr. Young likewise reports to me that all these Soldiers that were turned over have the Sickness to a Violent degree.

Not only did the movement of the Amerindian allies spread smallpox, but the disease also influenced Amerindian military strategy. Based on the variation in annual rates of Amerindians allied with the French, D. Peter MacLeod argues that smallpox was integral to Amerindian war strategy. These fluctuations do not directly correspond to the success or failure of French military ventures, but rather to the incidence of smallpox. 

French officials were aware of these consequences, and tried to obviate them in various ways. On occasion, they even told their Amerindian allies that it was the British who were responsible for spreading the disease, a tactic of blame that was hardly new. Montcalm recognized the ill-effects of smallpox, and wrote in his journal early in 1758: “Les sauvages ont perdu plusieurs d’entre eux de la petite vérole; c’est fâcheux; ils seront dégoutés de venir en guerre de nos côtés...” The effects of smallpox were similarly felt among provincials. As immunity to smallpox is not genetic, and as there is no perceptible difference between genetic immunity to disease of Europeans and Amerindians, American-born Europeans in the 18th century would have been just as susceptible to the ravages of the disease as Indigenous Americans. Although one study on measles suggests that the overall genetic homogeneity of Amerindians may have contributed to the virulence of an epidemic striking an early Aboriginal settlement, it is questionable whether this can be applied to 18th-century smallpox outbreaks. With provincial soldiers living and fighting side-by-side with British soldiers, and then returning to their homes when winter brought annual campaigns to an end, smallpox first attacked provincial troops and was then spread throughout the colonies.”

- Erica Charters, “Military Medicine and the Ethics of War: British Colonial Warfare during the Seven Years War (1756-63).” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. Volume 27:2 (2010): pp. 279-280. [AL: I have no idea why the editors, in 2010, though retaining Amerindian instead of First Nations or any other as a term of description was necessary.]

[stephenmccull]

Only One Vaccine Is OK for Older Teens. It’s Also the Hardest to Manage in Rural America.

As states expand covid-19 vaccine eligibility to allow shots for 16- and 17-year-olds, teens in rural America may have trouble getting them.

This story also ran on USA Today and GateHouse Media. It can be republished for free.

Of the three vaccines authorized in the U.S., currently only one can go to that age group: the Pfizer-BioNTech shot. That vaccine comes in 1,170-dose packages at minimum and expires after five days in a fridge, meaning too many doses on too tight a deadline for many rural communities to manage.

“We’re still trying to get people to accept the vaccine,” said Aurelia Jones-Taylor, CEO of Aaron E. Henry Community Health Services Center, which serves remote regions of the Mississippi Delta. “If we have to race to give out 1,100 doses in five days, that’s untenable.”

Some health experts say vaccinating children — more than a fifth of the nation’s population — is key to ending the pandemic. In the meantime, pressure is mounting to get vaccines out as health officials flag more surges of cases, this time with more contagious variants that seem to affect kids more than the initial virus strain that coursed through the U.S.

“The infection can continue to spread until we get everyone in the population vaccinated, and that includes younger individuals,” said Gypsyamber D’Souza, an epidemiologist with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The logistical challenges of eventually getting the shots to rural kids of all ages will likely continue, at least in the short term. That’s because the companies behind the sole vaccine with approval for 16- and 17-year-olds, Pfizer and BioNTech, have also been the first to seek federal approval to vaccinate younger ages after a trial showed the vaccine was effective in kids 12 through 15 years old. Pfizer spokesperson Steve Danehy said the company hopes to win regulatory approval for that age group before the start of the next school year.

For some families, the shots are so coveted that they’ll travel whatever distance it takes. Dr. Jeannette Wagner Waldron, 45, of Park County, Montana, said the closest place she was able to find a vaccine for her 17-year-old daughter, Julie Waldron, was Billings, which meant a nearly four-hour round trip to a CVS pharmacy there for the teen’s first shot.

“I’m more than willing to drive two hours to get my kiddos vaccinated,” Wagner Waldron said. “They’ve given up a lot, from their activities and seeing their friends, in order to protect people from the virus.”

Not everyone can travel that far for vaccines once, let alone twice to get both doses. Compound that with some reluctance in rural communities to get vaccinated at all. A recent KFF survey showed a larger share of rural residents — 21% — said they wouldn’t get a covid vaccine compared with urban and suburban respondents. That could mean not enough remaining demand for vaccines to use up a 1,170-dose Pfizer package in rural communities. Even if the demand exists, rural health departments may not have enough workers to administer the doses fast enough.

Karen Sullivan, health officer for the Butte-Silver Bow Health Department, said Butte will serve as the main vaccine base for 16- and 17-year-olds across five counties in southwestern Montana that together cover as much area as all of Maryland. She said she’s worried that delivering Pfizer shots to each community could risk wasting doses, but her department may make a new plan if too many people can’t get to Butte.

Health officials there have been trying to convince teenagers and their guardians the shots are safe and worth traveling for since Montana opened covid vaccines to everyone 16 and older April 1. Butte-Silver Bow’s new vaccine campaign includes sharing photos of the area’s school mascots getting the jab and raffle prizes for those who get vaccines.

“What we’re trying to do is get ahead of the variants,” Sullivan said. “We can’t get our 16- and 17-year-olds vaccinated fast enough, in my mind.”

Finding Pfizer vaccines can be challenging even in cities, which serve as medical hubs for rural communities. To help with that, some providers have set up online covid vaccine registration systems specifically for 16- and 17-year-olds, such as one through Stanford Children’s Health for clinics around San Jose, California.

In Mississippi, Jones-Taylor said her center hopes to reach kids through school-based and mobile outreach clinics. But she said that depends on either the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine, each of which have minimum shipments of 100 doses, gaining regulatory approval for minors. Both manufacturers are testing how their shots work in children.

The Children’s Health Fund, a national nonprofit, has advocated for the “continued urgent inclusion of children of all ages in vaccine trials” and for prioritizing a single-dose, easy-to-store vaccine.

Dr. Cody Meissner, a pediatrician on the vaccine advisory committee for the Food and Drug Administration, questions the rush to extend the vaccines to younger ages without more time to study potential impacts, adding that children so far have been less likely to transmit the virus or die from an infection.

The debate over whether to vaccinate younger kids as a means to end the pandemic may soon be moot, though, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. She pointed to a recent study out of Israel — a nation ahead of the rest of the world in its vaccine effort — which showed that infection rates declined even without immunizing children younger than 16. That study has yet to be peer-reviewed.

“We may get to herd immunity without vaccinating all kids,” Gandhi said. “But as long as it’s a safe vaccine, the more people that get it, the more people that develop immunity, the better.”

Back in Park County, which has a population of fewer than 17,000, health officials have seen an increase in covid cases among younger people in recent weeks, some tied to middle and high school sports.

Dr. Laurel Desnick, county health officer, said the county set up vaccine clinics in high schools by working with the state and neighboring counties to split up a shipment of Pfizer vaccines, though that took time to organize. Until mid-April, the county directed 16- and 17-year-olds like Julie Waldron to a county more than 100 miles away for a shot.

“Some of our kids could do it, but not all,” Desnick said. “The further you are from a big center, the harder this gets. We’re rural, but we’re also not as remote as many of the central or eastern Montana counties, and I feel for them.”

For Ava Braham, who turned 16 two days before Montana expanded eligibility to her age, a vaccine clinic in her Park County school means she missed only 20 minutes of class to get her shot this month instead of having to drive more than 50 miles round trip over a mountain pass.

“The biggest thing for me with the vaccine is being able to see my family more often. Both of my grandparents have already gotten the shot, but I will feel more comfortable visiting them,” Braham said. “It’s sort of a moral obligation to help the whole country and the world to just get the shot.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Only One Vaccine Is OK for Older Teens. It’s Also the Hardest to Manage in Rural America. published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Only One Vaccine Is OK for Older Teens. It’s Also the Hardest to Manage in Rural America.

As states expand covid-19 vaccine eligibility to allow shots for 16- and 17-year-olds, teens in rural America may have trouble getting them.

This story also ran on USA Today and GateHouse Media. It can be republished for free.

Of the three vaccines authorized in the U.S., currently only one can go to that age group: the Pfizer-BioNTech shot. That vaccine comes in 1,170-dose packages at minimum and expires after five days in a fridge, meaning too many doses on too tight a deadline for many rural communities to manage.

“We’re still trying to get people to accept the vaccine,” said Aurelia Jones-Taylor, CEO of Aaron E. Henry Community Health Services Center, which serves remote regions of the Mississippi Delta. “If we have to race to give out 1,100 doses in five days, that’s untenable.”

Some health experts say vaccinating children — more than a fifth of the nation’s population — is key to ending the pandemic. In the meantime, pressure is mounting to get vaccines out as health officials flag more surges of cases, this time with more contagious variants that seem to affect kids more than the initial virus strain that coursed through the U.S.

“The infection can continue to spread until we get everyone in the population vaccinated, and that includes younger individuals,” said Gypsyamber D’Souza, an epidemiologist with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The logistical challenges of eventually getting the shots to rural kids of all ages will likely continue, at least in the short term. That’s because the companies behind the sole vaccine with approval for 16- and 17-year-olds, Pfizer and BioNTech, have also been the first to seek federal approval to vaccinate younger ages after a trial showed the vaccine was effective in kids 12 through 15 years old. Pfizer spokesperson Steve Danehy said the company hopes to win regulatory approval for that age group before the start of the next school year.

For some families, the shots are so coveted that they’ll travel whatever distance it takes. Dr. Jeannette Wagner Waldron, 45, of Park County, Montana, said the closest place she was able to find a vaccine for her 17-year-old daughter, Julie Waldron, was Billings, which meant a nearly four-hour round trip to a CVS pharmacy there for the teen’s first shot.

“I’m more than willing to drive two hours to get my kiddos vaccinated,” Wagner Waldron said. “They’ve given up a lot, from their activities and seeing their friends, in order to protect people from the virus.”

Not everyone can travel that far for vaccines once, let alone twice to get both doses. Compound that with some reluctance in rural communities to get vaccinated at all. A recent KFF survey showed a larger share of rural residents — 21% — said they wouldn’t get a covid vaccine compared with urban and suburban respondents. That could mean not enough remaining demand for vaccines to use up a 1,170-dose Pfizer package in rural communities. Even if the demand exists, rural health departments may not have enough workers to administer the doses fast enough.

Karen Sullivan, health officer for the Butte-Silver Bow Health Department, said Butte will serve as the main vaccine base for 16- and 17-year-olds across five counties in southwestern Montana that together cover as much area as all of Maryland. She said she’s worried that delivering Pfizer shots to each community could risk wasting doses, but her department may make a new plan if too many people can’t get to Butte.

Health officials there have been trying to convince teenagers and their guardians the shots are safe and worth traveling for since Montana opened covid vaccines to everyone 16 and older April 1. Butte-Silver Bow’s new vaccine campaign includes sharing photos of the area’s school mascots getting the jab and raffle prizes for those who get vaccines.

“What we’re trying to do is get ahead of the variants,” Sullivan said. “We can’t get our 16- and 17-year-olds vaccinated fast enough, in my mind.”

Finding Pfizer vaccines can be challenging even in cities, which serve as medical hubs for rural communities. To help with that, some providers have set up online covid vaccine registration systems specifically for 16- and 17-year-olds, such as one through Stanford Children’s Health for clinics around San Jose, California.

In Mississippi, Jones-Taylor said her center hopes to reach kids through school-based and mobile outreach clinics. But she said that depends on either the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine, each of which have minimum shipments of 100 doses, gaining regulatory approval for minors. Both manufacturers are testing how their shots work in children.

The Children’s Health Fund, a national nonprofit, has advocated for the “continued urgent inclusion of children of all ages in vaccine trials” and for prioritizing a single-dose, easy-to-store vaccine.

Dr. Cody Meissner, a pediatrician on the vaccine advisory committee for the Food and Drug Administration, questions the rush to extend the vaccines to younger ages without more time to study potential impacts, adding that children so far have been less likely to transmit the virus or die from an infection.

The debate over whether to vaccinate younger kids as a means to end the pandemic may soon be moot, though, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. She pointed to a recent study out of Israel — a nation ahead of the rest of the world in its vaccine effort — which showed that infection rates declined even without immunizing children younger than 16. That study has yet to be peer-reviewed.

“We may get to herd immunity without vaccinating all kids,” Gandhi said. “But as long as it’s a safe vaccine, the more people that get it, the more people that develop immunity, the better.”

Back in Park County, which has a population of fewer than 17,000, health officials have seen an increase in covid cases among younger people in recent weeks, some tied to middle and high school sports.

Dr. Laurel Desnick, county health officer, said the county set up vaccine clinics in high schools by working with the state and neighboring counties to split up a shipment of Pfizer vaccines, though that took time to organize. Until mid-April, the county directed 16- and 17-year-olds like Julie Waldron to a county more than 100 miles away for a shot.

“Some of our kids could do it, but not all,” Desnick said. “The further you are from a big center, the harder this gets. We’re rural, but we’re also not as remote as many of the central or eastern Montana counties, and I feel for them.”

For Ava Braham, who turned 16 two days before Montana expanded eligibility to her age, a vaccine clinic in her Park County school means she missed only 20 minutes of class to get her shot this month instead of having to drive more than 50 miles round trip over a mountain pass.

“The biggest thing for me with the vaccine is being able to see my family more often. Both of my grandparents have already gotten the shot, but I will feel more comfortable visiting them,” Braham said. “It’s sort of a moral obligation to help the whole country and the world to just get the shot.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Only One Vaccine Is OK for Older Teens. It’s Also the Hardest to Manage in Rural America. published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[atlanticcanada]

Can a COVID-19 vaccine's second dose be delayed for weeks? What the science says

Experts say delaying the second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine would 'make sense' for Canada amid its slow rollout despite there being limited data about how long protection lasts until a second shot is needed.

Dr. Anna Banerji, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, told CTV News Channel on Tuesday that other provinces should follow British Columbia's move to extend the interval of vaccine doses up to 16 weeks given Canada's limited vaccine supply.

"I think it makes sense," Banerji said. "The ultimate goal is to maximize life and reduce suffering and the way we do that is by getting as much vaccine out to as many people as possible."

Newsletter sign-up: Get The COVID-19 Brief sent to your inbox

Banerji explained that the first dose of a vaccine gives a person immunity, while the second dose is for longevity.

"So if you give [the second dose] in one month, two months, it really doesn't make a difference as long as as many people as possible get the vaccine," she said.

B.C. announced on Monday that the province would be extending the interval between the first and second doses of all three Health Canada-approved COVID-19 vaccines up to four months.

B.C.'s Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said data from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, and trials from the U.K. and Israel show "miraculous" protection of at least 90 per cent from the first dose of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

"This gives us a very important and very real benefit to everybody here in B.C. That means we can move, everybody up the list, and more people will be protected sooner. Extending the second dose provides very high real world protection to more people sooner," Henry said during a press conference.

She added that the province will continue to "closely monitor" the delayed doses to ensure the effectiveness of its vaccine strategy going forward.

Dr. Dale Kalina, medical director of infection at the Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington, Ont., told CTV News Channel on Tuesday that he agrees with Henry and said that providing Canadians with even a "degree of immunity" is important.

"I think that it's responsible to get more people vaccinated, because that's going to get hopefully less of an opportunity for viral spread," Kalina said.

DISCUSSIONS ON DOSING INTERVALS 'ONGOING'

In the U.S., the nation's top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday that the country will stick to its two-dose vaccine plan, despite calls to shift to a single-dose or delayed interval strategy.

However, Henry said on Tuesday that the U.S. is able to stick to the current dosage schedules outlined by manufacturers because it is receiving more vaccines than Canada.

"This makes sense for us knowing that it is a critical time right now, with the limited amount of vaccines that we have in the coming weeks, to be able to provide that protection that is safe and long lasting in the short term," Henry said in a press conference.

Henry says Canada's National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) has also been looking into delaying the interval of doses and says it is expected to make the same recommendation for all of Canada "imminently."

NACI currently advises that the time between the first and second doses of the Moderna vaccine should be four weeks, three weeks for Pfizer, and 12 weeks for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

However, NACI's advice are recommendations and not rules, allowing provinces to continue to tailor their vaccination rollout campaigns to fit the pandemic reality in each region and determine which demographics are best suited to receive which vaccine based on the number of doses available.

Canada's Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Howard Njoo previously said during a federal press conference that the "early data" following the efficacy of a single dose is encouraging and discussions are "ongoing" regarding dosing intervals.

WHAT THE DATA SAYS

While research from around the world shows that current COVID-19 vaccines provide a certain amount of protection after a single dose, it is unclear how long that protection lasts until a second or booster shot is needed.

In a real-world test of data collected from 600,000 people following Israel's mass vaccination campaign, researchers found that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine is 92 per cent effective at preventing severe disease after two shots and 62 per cent after one.

The study, which was published by the New England Journal of Medicine, also showed that the vaccine's effectiveness at preventing hospitalization was 74 per cent after one shot and 87 per cent after two, and 46 per cent and 92 per cent, respectively, for preventing confirmed infection.

A U.K. study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, also recently found that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine cuts the number of asymptomatic infections in half which its researchers say could "significantly reduce" the risk of virus transmission.

However, BioNTech and Pfizer issued a warning in January that they have "no data" to demonstrate that their vaccine will continue to protect against COVID-19 if the second shot is given later than the 21 days tested in trials.

"The safety and efficacy of the vaccine has not been evaluated on different dosing schedules as the majority of trial participants received the second dose within the window specified in the study design," the companies said in a joint statement.

A combined study of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, published in The Lancet, suggests that a longer gap between vaccine doses -- approximately two to three months -- can also lead to a greater immune response.

The study, gathered from trials in Britain, Brazil and South Africa, reported 76 per cent efficacy against symptomatic infection for three months after a single dose.

While there are no clinical trials that have evaluated how long an immune response lasts following one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, some studies suggest efficacy can increase with time.

A U.S. study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine showed nearly 51 per cent efficacy between one and 14 days after the first dose, and 92 per cent efficacy 14 or more days after that dose.

However, researchers say the study is ongoing and the results may change over time.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/2OgIv1d