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Media Fail to Raise Alarm Over Deadly Lack of Booster Shots in Elderly Dorothee Benz ([link removed])


WaPo: Covid deaths no longer overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated as toll on elderly grows

The Washington Post's headline (4/29/22 ([link removed]) ) seems to play down the importance of vaccination—relegating the crucial message that people are dying for lack of boosters to the subhead.

On April 29, the Washington Post (4/29/22 ([link removed]) ) reported that Covid deaths among the vaccinated have been up sharply in 2022—42% of deaths in January and February were among vaccinated people according to the Post’s analysis of state and federal data—and that “a key explanation for the rise in deaths among the vaccinated is that Covid-19 fatalities are again concentrated among the elderly.” The paper went on to report that “the bulk of vaccinated deaths are among people who did not get a booster shot,” noting that data showed that in California and Mississippi 75% of the vaccinated seniors who died of Covid in the first two months of 2022 were not boosted.

The New York Times ran a story on May 31 ([link removed]) with similar content. The Post’s piece was framed around deaths among the vaccinated, while the Times’s focus was deaths during the winter omicron surge, but the narrative pointed to the same data: that in 2022 the vast bulk of deaths were once again among the elderly, as they had been in 2020 before the availability of vaccines. Covid is “preying on long delays since their last shots,” the Times piece said, and accompanying graphs and charts show that vaccines without boosters have left many vulnerable to serious illness and death.

Both pieces demonstrate that for the elderly, getting booster shots is literally a matter of life and death. Multiple studies in both Israel and the US point to the same conclusion (here ([link removed]) and here ([link removed]) , for instance).

Yet neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times directly address the lagging booster rate among older USians. Fewer than half of all those eligible have received a first booster shot; among those over 65, only 69% have gotten at least one booster shot—a significant difference from the 90%+ who have received the initial one- or two-shot vaccination series (KHN, 5/12/22 ([link removed]) ).

Given that seniors are clearly not vaccine-averse, and that without boosters they are at significant risk of death, the question of why more people 65 and older are not getting boosted is a pressing public health problem, one that ought to be getting significant media attention given how many lives are at stake.

Covid cases in the US have risen sharply over the last two months, but in that time there’s been hardly any mention in corporate media of the lagging booster rate among older USians, and even less analysis.


** 'Faulty messaging'
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KHN: Why Won’t More Older Americans Get Their Covid Booster?

“The booster program has been botched from day one,” Kaiser Health News (5/12/22 ([link removed]) ) reports—citing as an example the fact that the CDC uses the phrase "fully vaccinated" to refer to people it maintains are insufficiently vaccinated.

As far as I can tell, there has been exactly one article whose subject is the low booster rate among US seniors: “Why Won’t More Older Americans Get Their Covid Boosters?” by Liz Szabo from Kaiser Health News (5/12/22 ([link removed]) ). That piece was reposted by NBC (5/11/22 ([link removed]) ) and CNN (5/13/22 ([link removed]) ). It cited “a chorus of leading researchers” blaming “faulty messaging on booster shots”; quoted one institute director saying, “the booster program has been botched from day one”; and explained changes in the federal government’s distribution of vaccines that contribute to the lower booster rate:

Although the Biden administration coordinated vaccine delivery to nursing homes, football stadiums, and other targeted venues early last year, the federal government has played a far less central role in delivering boosters…. Today, nursing homes are largely responsible for boosting their residents…. And outside of nursing homes, people generally must find their own boosters, either through clinics, local pharmacies, or primary care providers.

Evidence suggests that this lack of support from the federal government is responsible for the lagging senior booster rate. In Minnesota, which at 83% has the highest senior booster rate of any state, officials used federal CARES money to bring mobile vaccine clinics to neighborhoods and mobile home parks and to provide booster shots to residents and staffers in long-term care facilities (KHN, 5/12/22 ([link removed]) ).

The May 31 New York Times piece, without mentioning the lagging booster rate per se, did make several mentions of the obstacles older people face in getting boosted. It also said, “Scientists said that the wintertime spike in Covid death rates among older Americans demanded a more urgent policy response.” The need for a better government response, though, is ongoing.

Most reporting on the overall low booster rate tends toward blaming individuals for their failure to get boosted. Structural causes are nowhere in sight. There’s a fair amount of talk about the “confusion” and “debate” about the second booster recommendation, but explanations for the low rate amount to comments like “a majority of the vaccinated public has not been convinced” (Washington Post, 3/25/22 ([link removed]) ) and “risk analysis is not the strong suit of most people” (Washington Post, 4/20/22 ([link removed]) ).


** 'For whatever reason'
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Washington Post: The troublesome U.S. booster gap

The Washington Post (4/18/22 ([link removed]) ) waits until the next-to-last paragraph to convey the key facts: "The weekly death rate over the final three months of 2021 was a little more than 1 per million for boosted people, and about 6 per million for vaccinated-but-unboosted people. Those compare to the 78 per million weekly rate we see from unvaccinated people."

Besides the Kaiser Health News story, I could find only one other article specifically on the low booster rate in the US, the Washington Post's “The Troublesome US Booster Gap” (4/18/22 ([link removed]) ), though it made no mention of the special vulnerability of older USians or their part in this trend. The piece, labeled an “analysis,” began by noting:

Booster shots are a significant shortcoming in the federal government’s coronavirus response—with no easy answers for why it has happened or what to do about it.

Reporter Aaron Blake ([link removed]) then went on to list various factors contributing to the booster gap. The first was “how partisan vaccines have become in the United States.” Acknowledging that this doesn’t explain everything, he mentioned “people who were willing to get two shots and, for whatever reason, haven’t been persuaded to get a third.” The article continued, “Another potential reason is the confusing rollout,” and added “there are signs that opposition to boosters is increasing and hardening among the vaccinated.” It then cited a bunch of opinion polls. That’s the “analysis,” and it never really went any deeper than the observation that “for whatever reason” some people don’t want to get a third shot.

All of this boils down once again to blaming individuals for not getting boosted. This is bad journalism in general, and does nothing to explain why people in institutional settings like nursing homes—those most at risk—aren’t getting boosted. At the end, the Post tosses off the observation that “our lagging booster rate creates all kinds of potential consequences down the road.” Those unnamed consequences, of course, include the unnecessary deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of older people—people whose low booster rate didn’t rate a mention in the article.


** Capitol Hill 'gambit'
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NYT: U.S. lawmakers struggle with how to get a Covid aid package passed over an immigration fight.

The New York Times (5/11/22 ([link removed]) ) presents the failure to pass life-saving Covid aid as a bipartisan puzzle rather than as a Republican refusal.

A May 20 New York Times piece ([link removed]) about the CDC recommendation that everyone over 50 get a second booster quoted the agency’s concern about “a steep and substantial increase in hospitalizations for older Americans” as a part of the reason for the recommendation. The article notes that “only one-fourth of those 65 and older who have gotten one booster dose…have gotten a second,” but doesn’t say anything at all about the low first booster rate, though clearly it is responsible for the alarming rise in hospitalizations as well as deaths.

Meanwhile, corporate coverage of the fight over additional Covid funding has largely followed predictable patterns. In an April 28 piece ([link removed]) , the Washington Post mixed metaphors of various “games” the Democrats and Republicans are playing: “Covid Funding Has Become a Gambit on Capitol Hill,” the headline reported, while the article said “Democratic leaders haven’t yet shown their cards.”

The New York Times (5/11/22 ([link removed]) ) described the funding as stuck in “an election-year dispute over immigration.” (There’s a whole world of problems with that last phrase in terms of corporate coverage of immigration, which is even worse than when I wrote about it recently—FAIR.org, 4/22/22 ([link removed]) .)

Left unsaid in these pieces is that if Republicans continue to succeed in blocking additional Covid funding, many more people will die. Most of them will be over 65.

There was one article that acknowledged the direct link between funding and deaths. On May 6, in “The White House, Warning of a Fall Surge, Plans for How to Provide Vaccines if There’s No More Covid Aid,” the New York Timesreported ([link removed]) that the Biden administration is planning to divert funds for therapeutics and testing for a “bare bones” vaccination effort if additional funding is not approved. That effort would be aimed at older and immune-compromised people. It adds, “But if access to vaccines is limited, the United States could see hundreds of thousands of deaths.”


** Human rights atrocity
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NYT: Biden Health Officials Warn of Substantial Increase in Virus Cases

In mustering evidence for what the Biden administration sees as "the country’s success" in dealing with the coronavirus, the New York Times (5/18/22 ([link removed]) ) notes that "Many people are vaccinated, [and] a fair number are boosted." By "a fair number," the Times means 32% of the total population.

The article does not say what a “bare bones” vaccination program would look like, but it is hard to imagine it would include the kinds of efforts the Kaiser Health News analysis identified as necessary to increase the booster rate among seniors. It’s outrageous that GOP obstruction could result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and equally outrageous that this reality is not being plainly reported on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.

It’s also outrageous that Democrats are unwilling to either go to the mat for Covid funding or to call out Republicans for their callous disregard for human life, the party’s “pro-life” platform notwithstanding. But as the Times noted in an article (5/18/22 ([link removed]) ) on the CDC’s alarm about rising cases:

The warnings from…federal health officials seemed somewhat at odds with President Biden’s own stance…. He no longer treats the pandemic as his chief concern among many…. The new approach is… a recognition of the political reality. Many Americans have decided to accept the risk of infection to resume their normal routines.

There’s a lot that could be said about the public health failures that have led “many” USians to return to “normal,” but for older people, “normal” means no additional government efforts to make boosters available, increasing risk of infection as restrictions continue to be lifted, and additional unnecessary deaths.

The utter failure to protect older people from death has been a singular catastrophe within the overall disaster that is the United States’ response to the Covid pandemic. Those 65 and older account for 75% of all covid deaths ([link removed]) , and the elderly living in long-term care facilities have suffered even greater death rates. A staggering 8% of all such people have died of Covid; for nursing home residents, that figure is 10%. Scholar and blogger Dave Kingsley ([link removed]) reported that it is “the largest mass fatality of an institutionalized population in the history of the United States.”

The willingness of corporate media to normalize so much preventable death makes them complicit in what Kingsley rightly called a “human rights atrocity.”
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