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“Don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ouchi!” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) yelled at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “You leave us the hell alone!” Boebert has described her election to Congress as “a sign and a wonder, just like God promised.” She’s a moderate in some circles. One Florida pastor hears parishioners call the vaccination the “sign of the beast,” a biblical reference to the apocalypse. A Tennessee pastor who threatens to expel anyone who wears a mask to his church also discourages people from getting the vaccination, which he falsely claims contains aborted fetal tissue. (J.M. Opal, 8/11)

On social media, I’ve been seeing sentiments that I never thought I’d see anyone express in a public forum. People who choose to be unvaccinated should not be offered lung transplants. What if people with COVID-19 who didn’t get the vaccine have to wait in the Emergency Department until everyone else is seen? Should unvaccinated patients just be turned away? These are harsh, angry feelings. And some of the people giving voice to them are doctors. (Chavi Eve Karkowsky, 8/11)

Interviewing Ayoade Alakija, an epidemiologist who co-chairs the African Union’s Africa Vaccine Delivery Alliance, about vaccine access was a brief, brutal lesson in global necropolitics. “Karen, it feels like the world doesn’t care about us,” the doctor said during a WhatsApp video call from Lagos, Nigeria. “The global community does not care about whether we live or die.” (Karen Attiah, 8/10)

We hunkered down, worked from home, wore masks, shopped online, did virtual school (the whole time), joined a pandemic pod, avoided large gatherings, ate outside, and my husband and I got vaccines the second we were eligible. Yet, as I write this, our 8-year-old daughter is upstairs in her room, under a fort of blankets, with a sore throat, fever, cough and a confirmed case of COVID. Where did we go wrong? Summer camp. (Tricia Bishop, 8/10)

Just a few weeks ago, my district was planning for a more “normal” school year free from many of the safety restrictions of the past year. But a surge in covid-19 cases has upended those plans, at least temporarily. And unfortunately, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) refuses to take the steps necessary to address the surge. Even worse, he’s preventing local leaders from doing what they can to protect their own communities. The governor recently threatened to withhold funds from school districts that implement certain safety measures, particularly masking. But we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the current crisis to score political points. (Alachua County Public Schools Superintendent Carlee Simon, 8/9)

At least on the surface, the tide has turned in favor of employers mandating that workers, and in some cases even customers visiting their premises, be vaccinated. ... But there’s less here than meets the eye. Some of these companies are exempting their front-line retail workers, who are most at risk of infection — and most likely to spread it to customers and family members. (Michael Hiltzik, 8/9)

Now that 70% of adult Americans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccination, most case fatalities occur among the unvaccinated. But the recent uptick in cases has led to another disturbing trend: COVID-19 schadenfreude, where social media users heap invectives upon unvaccinated patients who contract the virus. (Dr. Yoo Jung Kim, 8/11)