Peter Hotez on Vaccination.

Health expert Peter Hotez warns of a third COVID-19 wave, says a vaccine likely won't come for another year

By Shawn Mulcahy, The Texas Tribune Sept. 24, 2020

"Health expert Peter Hotez warns of a third COVID-19 wave, says a vaccine likely won't come for another year" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez warned Texas could face another potentially deadly spike in COVID-19 cases and said an immunization for the novel coronavirus likely won’t be widely available for another year during a conversation on Thursday at the 2020 Texas Tribune Festival.

Hotez, dean at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, criticized the White House’s lack of a coordinated response to the coronavirus, pointing to a drastic surge in cases in Texas, Georgia and Florida this summer.

“If we had had that leadership that had put in place a national campaign strategy to prevent the resurgence of COVID-19, we never would’ve been there,” he said.

At its peak in July, Texas logged more than 10,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day. Hospitals neared capacity, and open beds in intensive care units were sparse.

Now, new hospitalizations have fallen and the state is reporting about 3,500 new cases per day. But Hotez predicts another surge in Texas and across the nation this fall as students return to schools and colleges, and states loosen restrictions on businesses.

“We could have a resurgence — a third peak — that’s potentially worse than the one we just went through,” he said.

Even as Texans face yet another wave of the coronavirus, Hotez said a vaccine likely will not be widely available until the third quarter of 2021. Three U.S. companies are currently in the third phase of clinical trials and are expected to have enough data to determine efficacy by the end of the year.

Hotez warned communication between drug companies and the public is vital to a successful rollout, particularly amid growing public distrust of a potential vaccine. President Donald Trump has said he expects a vaccine to be ready before Nov. 3 — a claim widely disputed by scientists. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found that 6 in 10 Americans say they would not take a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as it is available.

“We’re going to need an unprecedented level of communication which we don’t have right now, unfortunately,” Hotez said.

He said he has a “high level of confidence” in the science of the vaccine, but worries public misconceptions could derail the process.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/24/peter-hotez-coronavirus/.

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Psychology of Climate Change Denial

I have been going through the "Denial101x - Making Sense of Climate Science Denial" MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).  It is available for free on the edx platform and you can also see a reference to it at https://skepticalscience.com/denial101x-videos-and-references.html. I just watched two extended video interviews that relate to the "psychology of denial".  I think you should take a look at them.  The first one is the interview with Stephan Lewandowsky who is at the University of Bristol in the UK.  His main point seems to be that for the most part the deniers have political issues related to accepting the evidence.  He says that over two thirds of the variance in acceptance can be accounted for by a person's worldview.  So the denial is not based on the science

• "When it comes to the drivers of belief or acceptance of scientific findings, in particular, climate change, then what we find is that one of the most important factors is a person’s worldview or you can call it a political ideology, their belief in things such as the free market. It turns out, in particular in the case of climate change, that people who are very enthusiastic about free markets and who think that government should not interfere with free markets, that they tend to reject the findings from climate change, climate science based on that ideology.  It’s a very strong effect. It’s a huge effect. In some of my data, it explains two-thirds of the variance. Now what that means is that if I know somebody’s belief about the free markets, I can reduce my uncertainty about what their climate change attitude is by two-thirds. There’s a huge correlation there between those two variables and that is one of the main drivers." 

Watch the entire video:

 

 The other interview is with Larry Hamilton from the University of New Hampshire:

Ex-Fox anchor explains how to start deprogramming your Fox-brainwashed friends and relatives, Part 1 on Front Page Live

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