Please go get a flu shot

 Massachusetts, as I noted yesterday, has had its first pediatric deaths from flu this winter: 

The flu has been associated with the deaths of four children in Massachusetts, health officials reported Tuesday as cases continue to surge in the state.

Two of the four deaths were of children under the age of 2 in Boston, according to the Boston Public Health Commission.

The Hill offers this map for the week ending December 27:

 

And note: 

“It is not too late to get a flu shot,” said Dr. Andrew Pekosz, a virologist and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said during a media briefing in December. “We’re really at the beginning of the influenza season here in the U.S.”

Please, please, ensure your family is vaccinated. This flu is putting people into the hospital and is killing people, including children. From ABC News yesterday:

The CDC estimates there have been 120,000 hospitalizations so far this season, a 48.1% increase from the prior week.

Additionally, the CDC says there have been at least 11 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths due to flu so far this season, including at least nine pediatric deaths.

Things to read this week

 Here are some tabs I have open that I'd recommend reading: 

• When we do facilities in the college class I teach, one thing my students most often remark on is the disparities among play space outdoors: who has a playground? who has access to grass?
  UC Davis is doing some interesting work measuring heat in school playyards, which particularly an issue for urban schools, where often the only play space is a patch of asphalt, and in a warming world. 
  
  
• You may have caught headlines about Alpha Schools, the chain that claims kids can spend just two hours a day with their generative AI "tutoring" overseen by adults who are not teachers. I urge you to read Wired's extensive piece on the actual experience of families, who are now pulling their kids out due to how their children were treated. This particularly matters as the chain is expanding across the country, funded in many places by vouchers.
  
  
• Reports this morning that Louisiana officials hid the whooping cough outbreak for months that killed two infants combined with this ProPublica piece reporting from Idaho, which now bans vaccine mandates, and where advocates hope to spread such laws, continues the trend towards what were preventable illnesses that kill, and particularly kill children, coming back full force. 
  It also increases the urgency of Massachusetts following Connecticut, New York, and Maine in barring religious exemptions.

I really like this red shed and tree across from
one of the elementary schools in East Longmeadow

A federalist vaccine policy hurts us all

 I recommend reading The New Yorker on what is becoming our federalized--as opposed to national--vaccine policy. 

Given Kennedy’s pedigree of vaccine skepticism, one might have expected him to take a sledgehammer to the bedrock of public health: the injections that have protected us against numerous infectious diseases for generations. In reality, the impact of his policies has been more like that of a freeze-thaw cycle. Rocks have tiny fissures into which water can seep; when the temperature drops, the water expands into ice, exerting pressure and widening the cracks. The cycle repeats and, eventually, the rock begins to fall apart. For the nation’s public-health infrastructure, Kennedy’s tenure has been one freeze-thaw cycle after another. The cracks are getting bigger.

Our requirements that children be vaccinated to attend school has been an incredible public health success:

 The C.D.C. estimates that routine childhood vaccination in the U.S. has saved more than a million lives, averted hundreds of millions of illnesses, and led to trillions of dollars in societal savings.

Something to remember? We aren't actually all that divided on this one:

 According to a new KFF-Washington Post survey, more than eighty per cent of Americans say that public schools should require students to get immunized against diseases such as polio and measles. 

Don't forget to get your fall flu and COVID shots!