Baker City herald., January 07, 2021, Page 4, Image 4

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
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EDITORIAL
State’s
sluggish
vaccine
strategy
Oregon has been more effi cient at restricting
businesses and denying students the best education
possible during the COVID-19 pandemic than it has
so far proved to be at inoculating residents with a
vaccine that offers great potential to thwart the virus.
Given the state’s stumbles over the past three
weeks, it’s reasonable to wonder whether Gov. Kate
Brown and other state leaders actually believed the
Pfi zer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines would be
available in mid-December.
Oregon received its fi rst doses on Dec. 14, but it
didn’t start vaccinating health care workers until
Dec. 16. Only one other state waited longer to give its
fi rst shots.
The problem has never been a shortage of doses.
In early December, before the fi rst shipment ar-
rived in Oregon, state offi cials said they expected to
receive 147,000 doses by the end of 2020.
But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention said 226,700 doses had been delivered to
Oregon as of Tuesday Jan. 5.
Yet as of that day, just 55,239 people in Oregon
had been inoculated. Just three states have used a
lower percentage of their vaccine supply, according to
Bloomberg. In early December, Brown estimated the
state would inoculate 100,000 Oregonians by the end
of the year. The state barely reached half of that level.
Brown issued a written statement about the situ-
ation on Monday. It reads not like a mea culpa, but
rather like something a teenager might say after
being caught out after curfew with friends.
“Oregon, like most of the country, is not moving fast
enough,” Brown said.
Except Oregon isn’t like “most of the country” when
it comes to deploying its vaccine doses. Indeed, most
of the country — 46 of the other 49 states — is doing
better than Oregon.
Brown: “All states are grappling with the same
logistical challenges ...”
No doubt that’s true. But why, then, are most states
outperforming Oregon?
South Dakota has administered more than 60% of
its vaccine doses. Maine, Connecticut, Tennessee and
North Dakota have used more than half of theirs.
Brown announced Monday that she had “directed
the Oregon Health Authority to achieve the bench-
mark of 12,000 vaccinations administered in Oregon
per day by the end of the next two weeks.” Brown
termed the campaign an “all-hands-on-deck effort.”
That’s a fi ne goal.
But why is the governor setting this goal on Jan. 4,
three weeks after the fi rst vaccine doses arrived and
more than a month after it was obvious that federal
regulators would be approving at least the Pfi zer-
BioNTech vaccine?
This should have been an “all-hands-on-deck effort”
even before the fi rst doses arrived.
Distributing the COVID-19 vaccines is not solely a
state issue, to be sure.
Hospitals and health departments are administer-
ing many of the doses. Some people who were offered
the vaccine declined to take it. And the holiday sea-
son isn’t the ideal period to undertake this task.
Yet as Brown herself said, none of these challenges
is unique to Oregon.
The governor’s call to action Monday, belated
though it is, was welcome — and necessary. Nothing
is more important than the speedy, effi cient inocula-
tion against COVID-19 in curbing the spread of the
virus to the point that businesses can fully reopen
and students can return to their classrooms.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Your views
Government is threatened
by 2020 election fraud
Our government “of the people, by
the people, and for the people” is in dan-
ger of perishing due to election fraud of
2020.
I am an American citizen, before all
else, and believe in the Constitution,
The Bill of Rights, and the Declaration
of Independence. The preamble to the
Constitution states “We the people of
the United States ... do ordain and es-
tablish this Constitution for the United
States of America.” Abraham Lincoln
wrote “Government of the people, by the
people, for the people shall not perish
from this earth.”
Now our government is, indeed, in
danger of “perishing.” The right for “a
fair and free election” has been denied
“we the people” in the 2020 federal elec-
tion for president of the United States
and other offi ces.
Given the above, I thought it was my
responsibility to search out information
on what is known about the election of
2020. I found a comprehensive summa-
tion, “The Navarro Report.” In the sum-
mation of the fi ndings, “The Navarro
Report” states “the weight of evidence
and patterns of irregularities are such
that it is irresponsible for anyone —
especially the mainstream media — to
claim that there is “no evidence” of
fraud or irregularities.” Further, it
states that “the ballots in question be-
cause of identifi ed election irregularities
are more than suffi cient to swing the
outcome in favor of President Trump
should even a relatively small portion of
these ballots to be ruled illegal.”
Given the failure of the government,
both state and federal, it is necessary
for us to communicate to our congress-
men to do their due diligence and
address the wrong perpetrated on the
American people. If voter fraud isn’t ad-
dressed now “this nation runs the real
risk of never being able to have a fair
presidential election” is noted by “The
Navarro Report” and confi rms my view
of this.
If “we the People” don’t exhort our
government representatives to address
this, who will?
Karen Cloudt
Baker City
Making schools a top priority
By Danny Westneat
The raging debate about whether to
reopen schools during the coronavirus
pandemic seems destined to come to an
end in the next few months.
Not because they fi nally fi gured
out the right path, based on infectious
disease controls or societal values. But
because of the vaccine.
I don’t blame anyone for not solving
this one. Whether to send kids and
teachers back into classrooms, or keep
doing Zoom school, was 2020’s impos-
sible issue.
The growing damage to some kids of
keeping schools closed is painfully clear.
At the same time, more than 300 school
employees around the country have
died from COVID-19 (what complicates
this tragic stat is that it isn’t known for
many whether they caught the virus
at school, because testing and contact
tracing has been so spotty).
Scientists have since learned more
about how the coronavirus spreads,
and concluded in a study last week
that some schools probably could have
been reopened faster. Especially had
we deployed more testing, to better
track outbreaks and understand the
rates of disease spread in surrounding
communities.
Looking back, though, we tended to
devote those testing resources to things
like getting college and pro football
back up and running.
The intractability of all this was
highlighted for me in October, when
a doctor forwarded an open letter
by fi ve pediatric physicians, arguing
that schools for younger kids should
reopen. They made a good case. But
then I asked the doctor, based on his
own experience with infectious disease
controls in local hospitals, whether he
himself would be willing to stand in a
classroom with dozens of kids rotating
through for six or eight hours each day.
His answer: “For the record, no way
in hell would I do that … My sense is
that our education system is so broken
and under-resourced that many cannot
even fathom what it would really take
to do this safely … there are lots of
things that can make this safe, if only
we choose to do them.”
Story of the pandemic right there.
Lots we could have, should have done,
but didn’t.
The hope now is that this “impossible
issue” could — repeat could — be made
somewhat moot by the vaccine.
There are only 3 million K-12 public
school teachers in America. If we made
it a priority, we could have National
Teacher Vaccination Day, offering them
all the shot in one day. Then go back to
in-person school (after the waiting peri-
ods for the vaccine to take effect). There
would still have to be PPE and other
disease controls, and many parents
may still choose not to send their kids,
but at least the decision-tree logjam
would be shaken up.
I know, hoping technology will fi x a
problem is the easy way out. But with
vaccination here, I’d argue we should
be more focused now on the future
anyway — on how students are going
to recover from a degraded year of
schooling.
So here’s a big idea for 2021: Why not
use the federal COVID relief money,
which clocks in at $824 million for
K-12 schools for Washington state, for
example, on a jobs program in which
we hire older students to do one-on-one
tutoring in schools?
Two education professors at Brown
University just proposed this on a na-
tional scale. They argue the best way to
tackle COVID-19 learning loss would
be to hire 300,000 to several million
part-time tutors nationwide.
“Tutoring is among the most effec-
tive education interventions ever to be
subjected to rigorous evaluation,” they
write. “Our blueprint is that … high
school students would tutor in elemen-
tary schools, college students in middle
schools, and full-time 2- and 4-year
college graduates in high schools via
AmeriCorps.”
“Returning schools to the way they
were when they closed last spring will
not heal the damage students have
sustained,” echoes Robert Slavin, an
education research director at Johns
Hopkins University, who has also
proposed what he dubs a “tutoring
Marshall Plan.”
This is the best COVID recovery idea
I’ve heard yet, by far. For starters, one-
on-one tutoring just works. It isn’t that
costly — one of the proposals above
estimates around $1,000 per year per
kid. That means tutoring, say, half the
K-12 kids in Washington state, could
cost on the order of $550 million — only
about 2% of what the state spends on
schools annually (and less than the
$824 million the state was just granted
in schools COVID relief).
It could help jump-start the pandem-
ic-frozen job prospects of high school
seniors and college kids. More crucially,
it could reintroduce Zoom-quarantined
little kids, many of them poor and
falling behind, to one-on-one academic
attention from another human.
That last part is priceless. Social
distancing can stem the spread of a
disease. But the year of our pandemic
has shown how brutal isolation can be
for public education. Maybe the key to
a more promising 2021 involves doing
the exact opposite.
claims. However, we cannot verify the
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the editor.
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Danny Westneat is a columnist for
The Seattle Times.
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