United States of America eSeries: Cue the vaccine requirements

08.24.21

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by Zachary B. Wolf and Paul LeBlanc

: The Latest

Vice President Kamala Harris' trip to Asia was complicated by a possible Havana Syndrome incident -- that's the mysterious ailment that has affected hundreds of US officials in recent years.

Herschel Walker, the former NFL running back, at the prodding of former President Donald Trump, filed paperwork to run for Senate in Georgia. It'll test Trump's sway with GOP voters and could be a nightmare for Republicans in Washington who covet a Senate majority.

House Democrats withstood, for now, a liberal/moderate divide to approve a $3.5 trillion budget plan, a key step in Democrats' hopes to sidestep the filibuster in the Senate and a complication for a separate, smaller bipartisan bill.

But main storylines that matter most this week remain:

The frenzied US evacuation out of Afghanistan of tens of thousands of people as it pulls out on an end-of-month timeline from which President Joe Biden will not budge.
The full approval by the FDA of Pfizer/BioNTech's Covid vaccine, a key moment in the US fight against the virus.

Here's a deeper look at key elements of both stories, including an on-the-ground dispatch from the airlift in Afghanistan.

: Cue the vaccine requirements

The US crossed a major Covid milestone when the FDA granted full approval for the first time to Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine.

Already, more major employers and government entities are moving to make the vaccine a condition of employment.

In the day since the FDA news, the Pentagon, Goldman Sachs, CVS Health, numerous college systems, school systems insisting on teacher vaccinations and more have shifted gears.

For the Pentagon, the requirement will affect the more than 1.3 million active duty service members, although most of them are already vaccinated. Here's an interesting breakdown of active duty service members.

It is through these conditions that the FDA's move is most consequential since it's not at all clear a large portion of the 80 million Americans who are eligible for the vaccine but haven't gotten it will suddenly jump in line.

The unconvince-able. Watch this incredible video from CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, who traveled to Alabama, where Covid is raging and former President Donald Trump appeared Saturday.

God's separating the sheep from the goats, one woman tells him of why she won't get vaccinated, explaining she's a goat because she's not going to blindly do what she's told.

When O'Sullivan points out that Trump has gotten the vaccine (he was booed Saturday when he recommended to an Alabama audience that they too get the shot), she doesn't seem to believe it.

It's oversimplifying things to think it's just die-hard Trump supporters who won't get the shot. The New York Times went into an ICU in Arkansas and talked in-person to people whose doctors think will die from Covid-19, who are in the hospital, about their opposition to the vaccine.

That vaccines have saved lives is a simple fact. That they're not perfect is also becoming clear, according to a CNN report Tuesday on a new study published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It suggests the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines dropped from 91% to 66% once the Delta variant accounted for the majority of circulating virus, according to a study published Tuesday by the CDC.

People who get the vaccine are much less likely to get very sick or die is obvious from the fact that the hospitalization rate among the unvaccinated was more than 29 times those in fully vaccinated people, according to the CDC. The infection rate of the unvaccinated was nearly 5 times the fully vaccinated. Separate research suggests a fully vaccinated person who gets infected is less likely to spread the virus.

New target: Next spring. If the "overwhelming majority" of the population gets vaccinated the US could have the pandemic "under control" by spring of 2022, the latest hopeful timeline offered by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the President's chief medical adviser.

"We hope we'll be there ... but there's no guarantee because it's up to us," Fauci told CNN's Anderson Cooper Monday.

For anyone looking back through their calendar, Fauci's hope for Spring seems very far off.

We've had targets before. It's two years after Trump promised an Easter end to the Covid-19 nightmare in 2020 and many months after President Joe Biden wanted an July 4th Covid-19 independence celebration.

Meanwhile, masks. And it means we'll have kids in schools for most of a year without access to a vaccine for those under 12. I'll take it. I've got three kids starting full-time five-day-a-week school this week for the first time in what feels like an eternity. I'm expecting there will be Covid scares and potentially quarantines -- I've read about many since kids began returning to the classroom and heard about plenty more.

Masks are required indoors in our schools. But I saw more happiness than complaining when I dropped my youngest off for school.

There's more on Covid, including a frustrating first-person account from my CNN colleague about the shortage of ICU bed if you click here.

: On the ground at the Kabul airport

Paul talked to CNN's Sam Kiley, one of the few Western journalists still on the ground in Afghanistan. A portion of their conversation is below. Read the whole thing here.

What Matters: You got into Afghanistan on Sunday. What was your impression when you first got on the ground?

SK: We arrived midafternoon on a Qatari flight and I was pleased and relieved to see quite large, well-ordered queues of people already being loaded onto aircraft from around the world.

So the kind of awful scenes that Clarissa (Ward) had witnessed on her way out in the very early stages of the evacuation were not being repeated by the time I got in. But there were very large numbers and there were also, of course, very large numbers of people pressed up against the walls outside, and indeed on that day -- although we didn't know it at the time, exactly -- but on that day, seven people were killed in crushes against the walls. A lot of them close to the British military camp.

What Matters: The US evacuation effort has obviously ramped up in recent days. Are you seeing planes constantly coming in and out of the Kabul airport?

SK: Yeah. So there is a constant circulation of aircraft, mostly big cargo lifts, C-17s and these propeller planes or kind of NATO aircraft. There's a small number of civilian aircraft. I've seen Kam Air, which is an Afghan airline that took several hundred people off. I watched that takeoff this afternoon. So there most certainly has been a very significant increase, and that's borne out by the statistics, which show -- according to the United States -- that 21,000 were evacuated over a 24-hour period. That's both US and coalition evacuees. Americans evacuated about 12,000 of them.

Today, by lunchtime the Americans had evacuated about 9,000. The numbers of people waiting to be evacuated, seem to be sitting between 4 and 5,000 as small numbers of people are now able to get in. But everything is much, much more slickly organized, and there's no great surprise -- people should get better at what they do. And nobody's had any practice in this kind of an operation, so that it was chaotic to begin with and now is pretty slick is no great surprise.

It doesn't solve many of the problems outside of the gate, but it does mean that you don't get the massive bottlenecks that we saw at the beginning.

What Matters: The people you're seeing who are actually reaching the airfield, are they relieved? Are they just anxious for the flight to actually take off? What's their state of mind?

SK: It's very clear almost every person is very, very badly torn by the need to get out and save themselves and their families, in their view, and their friends and families in the country that they're leaving behind.

I spoke to, on the day I arrived, a fellow journalist who had to get out in 2016 because he'd been threatened by the Taliban but was able to come back and work in Kabul with a bit of a lower profile. He felt he had to get out. He said that he was heartbroken and actually it was a very, very moving encounter. I don't often -- I try to control myself on air because I'm a professional. But there was something about a member of my tribe being heartbroken and being sort of -- it was a real kind of emotional gut punch to see the look in his eyes when he was leaving.

And that is a look that I've seen in the eyes of lots of people. And just today, I spoke to a young woman, mostly through a translator, who was getting out but who had got separated from her brother, who was also hoping to get out but he'd got stuck on the wrong side of the gate. And she was moments away from getting on an aircraft and didn't appear to know where she was going to end up. And she had with her her two younger sisters, one of whom was probably about 9.

And she was in tears over the fact that she was going to leave her brother behind, but went ahead with the evacuation because she felt she had no choice.

Read more.