COVID vaccines are a gift -- if we accept them -- Dec. 17, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

This Christmas, the gifts of Three Wise Men -- make that three pharmaceutical companies -- are COVID-19 vaccines.

The Pfizer vaccine is in distribution, Moderna’s is about to be authorized, and AstraZeneca’s is likely not far behind.

In 2020, these treasures are more valuable than gold, frankincense and myrrh. If we’ve learned anything during the pandemic, it’s that safety and good health are of incalculable worth.

Seeing the first American healthcare workers baring their upper arms to get the shots boosted everyone’s morale. But it’s estimated 60% to 80% of Americans will need to be immune to the devastating virus, either through infection or vaccination, to achieve herd immunity and begin to resume normal life. That will take months.

The arrival of the miracle vaccines also raises a question: Will people get them?

Polls and anecdotal reports indicate a wide swath of the population, and Black people especially, may be wary. Only 17% or Blacks said they’d definitely get a COVID vaccine, compared with 37% of whites and Hispanics, a Kaiser Family Foundation Poll in October reported.

That was before the vaccines were a reality and before people began seeing their peers gladly roll up their sleeves.

Sandra Lindsay, 52, an intensive care nurse in Queens, New York, who is Black, received the Pfizer vaccine Monday, one of the first people in the United States to do so.

Her goal wasn’t to be first, she told The New York Times, “but to inspire people who look like me, who are skeptical in general about taking vaccines.”

Generations of Black Americans have grown up distrusting the federal government’s medical programs since the 1932 Tuskegee study in which Black men who had syphilis were left untreated so doctors could study the effects.

Many Americans are inoculation phobic. Most adults typically don’t even get a flu vaccine.

In addition, since it usually takes years to develop a vaccine, the speed at which the COVID vaccines arrived makes even some medical personnel leery of taking the first shots, although clinical trials show the vaccines are remarkably effective and safe.

In its first analysis of the Pfizer vaccine, the Food and Drug Administration found it worked well no matter the volunteer’s age, race or weight. It was 95% effective after two shots three to four weeks apart. Side effects are generally mild, although some experts suggest people might want to take the day off after the second dose in case it brings fatigue, chills or fever.

There’s much we don’t yet know. How well will the vaccine work on children and pregnant women? How long will immunity last? And, while the vaccine protects vaccinated persons from the disease, can the vaccinated still spread the virus through droplets in sneezes and coughs?

The recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is for healthcare workers and long-term care residents to be the highest priority for shots. The Virginia Health Department adopted the recommendation.  

The advisory committee seems likely to recommend that other essential workers be next, followed by those over 65 and those younger who have health conditions that put them at high risk – a plan Virginia also has adopted.

States vary in their priorities. A few states have prioritized law enforcement, prisoners and the homeless in the first group, a review of state policies by the Kaiser Family Foundation found.

The supply of vaccines is limited at present but will increase. By next spring or summer, the general population in Virginia and elsewhere will be eligible to be jabbed.

But will they? A blizzard of misinformation is coming from sources many consider reputable – political figures, radio talkers, posters on social media. By now, no one should believe COVID-19 is a hoax. Not when more than 300,000 in the United States have died of the disease this year and millions more face long-term symptoms.

That’s why everyone must mask up and practice good hygiene and social distancing well into 2021. By next Christmas, with luck and perseverance, we can celebrate the end of the pandemic.

The vaccines are a gift, but first we must accept them.

©2020 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Smarter than a congressman? Test yourself on foreign aid -- March 9, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Donald Trump’s budget for the fiscal year that begins in October likely will include a $54 billion hike in defense spending and drastic cuts in the State Department and foreign aid to pay for it.

But it’s far from a sure thing. The president’s budget is a proposal or starting point. Congress has the final word and will begin work on the budget later this month.

Americans believe we spend too much on foreign aid, polls show, although people have misconceptions about what’s called “soft power” – humanitarian relief, economic development and anti-poverty programs, among others.

Think you know foreign aid? Before the debate begins, test your smarts with our 10-question quiz. Answers are below. Good luck! 

1)    How much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid?

A.   31 percent

B.   26 percent

C.   15 percent

D.   1 percent

2)    Roughly how much will the United States spend this year on foreign assistance?

A.   $100.5 billion

B.   $75 billion

C.   $36.5 billion

D.   $20 million

3)    How many countries around the world receive U.S. foreign aid?

A.   50

B.   75

C.   More than 100

D.   More than 200

4)    Which country receives the most foreign assistance from the United States?

A.   Iraq

B.   Afghanistan

C.   Egypt

D.   Israel

5)    The United States provides more foreign aid than any other nation. How much of the world’s development assistance comes from the United States?

A.   24 percent

B.   30 percent

C.   50 percent

D.   65 percent

6)    The United States hasn’t always been the No. 1 donor. Which country provided more foreign aid between the years of 1989 and 2001?

A.   United Arab Emirates

B.   Japan

C.   Saudi Arabia

D.   Qatar

7)    Where does the money go? Pick the largest program category.  

A.   Peace and security  

B.   Humanitarian assistance   

C.   Health

D.   Economic development

8)    Where else? Which of these smaller categories distributes the most money?

A.   Environment  

B.   Education and social services

C.   Democracy, human rights and governance

9)    The State Department and USAID are two of the federal agencies involved in foreign aid. How many agencies in total provide foreign assistance?

A.   10  

B.   20

C.   25

10)           Name that tweeter: “Foreign aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.”

A.   Hillary Clinton

B.   Marco Rubio

C.   Barack Obama

D.   Mitt Romney

ANSWERS:

1       1)    D.  Foreign assistance was 1.3 percent of federal budget authority in fiscal 2015, the Congressional Research Service reported in June. Americans’ average guess is 31 percent, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found last year. Only about three people in 100 knew foreign aid is about 1 percent.

2      2)    C. Tallies vary from $31.3 billion to $39.9 billion, depending on the kinds of assistance included and how the calculations are made, according to PolitiFact. The $36.5 billion figure comes from foreignassistance.gov, a federal site that collects data from federal agencies involved in foreign aid.

3     3)    C. Source: foreignassistance.gov

4     4)    D. Israel -- $3.1 billion this year, increasing to $3.8 billion after 2017, followed by Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq. (foreignassistance.gov)

5     5)    A. 24 percent in 2014 (Congressional Research Service)

6     6)    B. Japan took the lead when foreign aid spending by the United States declined after the Cold War ended. United States spending rose after 9/11, surpassing Japan. (Congressional Research Service)

7     7)    C. Health at $9.3 billion in 2017, followed by Peace and Security at $8.3 billion, Humanitarian Assistance at $6.0 billion, and Economic Development at $3.7 billion (foreignassistance.gov)

8     8)    C. Democracy at $2.7 billion, followed by Environment at $1.3 billion and Education at $1.1 billion (foreignassistance.gov)

9     9)    B. These include the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury as well as such independent agencies as the Peace Corps and Millenium Challenge Corporation.

1     10)                       B. Sen. Rubio of Florida on Feb. 28, 2017.

For more, check out www.foreignassistance.gov

Out with Obamacare, in with . . . Trumpcare -- Dec. 8, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

You’d think they’d be ready by now.

For nearly seven years, congressional Republicans have promised to “repeal and replace” Obamacare with something better and more affordable.

Repeal is easy. Since President Barack Obama got the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 without a single Republican vote, the House has voted more than 60 times to repeal all or part of it.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump called the law “a total disaster” and vowed to repeal and replace it on Day One.  

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday repeal will be the first item of business in the New Year when the Senate returns Jan. 3.

Replace is hard. Republicans have yet to agree on a path forward for what inevitably will be known as Trumpcare. 

Even Trump now wants to keep two popular provisions of the health law. After he met with Obama in the Oval Office, the president-elect said he favors allowing children under 26 to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans and requiring coverage of people with existing medical conditions.

Trump’s a big-picture guy, so replacement details will fall to Congress, where, until the election, many were more interested in politics than policy. I know you’re surprised.

Only on Dec. 2 did House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy send a letter to governors and state insurance commissioners asking for their ideas about health care reform.That way, if Trumpcare goes bad, state officials can share the blame.

McCarthy said the two-step repeal and replace process could take much of next year and beyond. House Speaker Paul Ryan also lowered expectations of speedy action.

“Clearly there will be a transition and a bridge so that no one is left out in the cold, so that no one is worse off,” Ryan said Monday in an interview with Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Ryan would not hazard a guess about how long the transition might take.

“It will clearly take time. It took them about six years to stand up Obamacare. It’s not going to be replaced come next football season,” he said.

One possibility is for Republicans to resurrect the repeal bill Obama vetoed last January. It called for a two-year delay in the effective date of replacement. Some Republicans say six months is enough.

Republican leaders invited Democrats to work with them, even though Republicans refused to cooperate with Obama. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer derided Republicans as “the dog who caught the bus,” saying, “They don’t know what to do.”

Repeal without replacement will cause “huge calamity from one end of America to the other,” Schumer said. “Bring it on.”

In a letter to Trump, the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals urged him and Congress not repeal Obamacare without a replacement. If that happens, Congress should restore funding to hospitals that was cut by Obamacare, the groups said, so hospitals can defray some of their costs.

The nonpartisan but left-leaning Urban Institute warned in an analysis this week that repeal without a clear replacement could throw into chaos the private health insurance market. Millions of Americans buy insurance directly rather than through an employer.

The number of uninsured could rise to 59 million by 2019, the study said. That’s far more than the 41 million who lacked insurance in 2014 when major provisions of Obamacare went into effect. About 28.5 million remained uninsured last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Trump’s pick to lead Health and Human Services, House Budget Chairman Tom Price, wants to replace Obamacare with modest tax credits pegged to age, not income, to help people buy insurance on the private market.

Price’s proposed Empower Patients First Act also calls for grants to help states create “high-risk” insurance pools and expands health savings accounts.  

Republicans have not rushed to embrace the plan. Critics say it’s woefully underfunded and millions of Americans would lose coverage.

Taking time is not necessarily bad. Rushing could be worse.

But if members of Congress are going to blow up Obama’s signature legislation, they should be held to their promises and do no harm to the more than 20 million people who have insurance because of Obamacare.

To do anything less is to risk disappointing and disillusioning more Americans at a time when trust in government and politicians is badly frayed.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Up against the cliff -- what words tell us -- Nov. 28, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

What if it hadn’t been a cliff that Ben Bernanke conjured up last February?

The Federal Reserve chairman used the phrase “fiscal cliff” to describe the drastic effects on the economy of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that will take place after Jan. 1, if Congress and the White House fail to agree on a deficit reduction plan.

He could have said, as some liberal Democrats do now, fiscal slope or curve or hill. Progressives hope downplaying the danger of the cliff will give President Barack Obama more spine in negotiating with the Republicans. 

  

Bernanke’s use of cliff in testimony on Capitol Hill seemed fresh, but it was a 1970s retread.

Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for the Boston Globe, tracked fiscal cliff to a Dallas Morning News editorial on June 16, 1975: "Who hasn't looked with horror at New York City's financial plight? The nation's biggest, richest city is about to go over the fiscal cliff if the state and federal governments don't lend a helping hand." 

Zimmer found other newspaper writers had climbed the fiscal cliff in the 1980s to describe their local budget battles.

   

With his visit to the cliff, Bernanke endowed with horror the prospect that Washington again will fail to deal with the nation’s economic problems. Naturally, the phrase caught on. It’s our own Mayan end of the world. 

Nobody imagined we’d still be staring into the canyon nine months later.

Calling it a curve instead of a cliff might not make reaching compromise in Washington any easier, but a more benign metaphor might prevent a sense of rising panic in some Americans.

The stock markets are nervous, and some people reportedly were so anxious about the looming consequences of cliff diving -- recession and unemployment over 9 percent – that they stayed home on Black Friday. Friends, that is no way to jumpstart the economy.

For many of us, fiscal cliff evokes the last scene in the movie “Thelma and Louise,” only now, 21 years later, we’re in the back seat of the Thunderbird, about to sail into the abyss.  

We stand by helplessly as talking heads say that the president and the House speaker again today did not meet face to face. The countdown continues to cliffageddon.

The fiscal cliff is the latest in a series of cinematic terms with political impact. Ronald Reagan brought us welfare queens, Barack Obama the bitter people clinging to their guns and religion, and Mitt Romney the 47 percent on the dole who see themselves as victims.

It’s possible the fiscal cliff won’t disappear with the New Year’s confetti. The president and Congress could do just enough to get us through the crisis and resume negotiations on the debt ceiling and tax and entitlement reforms next year. 

Speaking of entitlement reform, Republicans say Democrats must embrace cuts in safety net programs to reach a budget deal. Only a few months ago, though, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee urged GOP candidates to steer away from the very words entitlement reform.

“Do not say ‘entitlement reform,’ ’privatization,’ ‘every option is on the table,’” the campaign committee advised in an email in August, shortly after Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan, the House budget chairman, as his running mate, Politico reported. “Do say: ‘strengthen,’ ‘secure,’ ‘save,’ ‘preserve,’ ‘protect.’”

The goal was to distance Republican candidates from some of Ryan’s “reforms” of Social Security and Medicare, which were unpopular with older voters.

This week, Drew Altman, head of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank on health policy issues, suggested that news organizations resist using the phrase entitlement reform, even though politicians do.

The phrase makes any changes in Medicare and Medicaid that Democrats and Republicans agree on “sound more palatable and forward thinking,” Altman wrote on his blog.

Altman, a former welfare commissioner of New Jersey who worked on state and national welfare reform, said he’d been pleased years ago when reporters wrote of “welfare reform.”

“Welfare ‘overhaul’ would have been a much more neutral description but I admit that when I was selling my welfare reform program…I was more than happy for the media call it reform,” he wrote.

Words do matter. Now, can we reform the cliff?

© 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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