Spaniards put faith in COVID-19 vaccines even as cases surge - Yahoo News

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Like many of Spain’s 20-somethings, Sergio Rosado has seen the new, more contagious coronavirus strain strike those too eager to cut loose when authorities rolled back health restrictions with vaccinations picking up pace.

The program is built on Spain’s efficient public health care system, a well-ordered vaccination plan that stuck strictly to age groups, and a populace confident in the safety of childhood immunizations and therefore largely resistant to skepticism about COVID-19 jabs.

Spain’s public health care system, which has suffered budget cuts in the past decade, buckled last year under the first wave of the virus, which has claimed at least 81,000 lives in the country.

It is a public health question,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told MSNBC while on a visit last week to the United States.

More than 90% of Spain’s public health workers have been vaccinated, compared with 42% of public health workers in France.

“A month ago, when we let go of the most of the restrictions, we didn’t call it ‘Freedom Day’ like England, but basically it was a fairly big move toward more freedom," Rafael Bengoa, former Director for Health Systems at WHO and one of Spain’s leading public health experts, told the AP.

“If you want to control the pandemic in this situation, you have to be doing both the traditional public health restrictions plus the vaccinations,” Bengoa explained.

Spain’s government polling bureau said last week that nearly 90% of respondents under 35 said they wanted to get vaccinated.

On a single day this past week, more than a half-million people across the United States trickled into high school gymnasiums, pharmacies and buses converted into mobile clinics.

While the CDC has not called for the vaccinated to mask up to protect against COVID-19 as virus variants surge, many health experts say they are.

Daily vaccination rates are increasing in states with recent COVID-19 surges like Arkansas and Louisiana.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that he was aiming to begin a dialogue with the country's political opposition next month in Mexico facilitated by Norway, a process he hoped the United States would embrace.

Maduro has overseen an economic collapse in once-prosperous Venezuela since taking office in 2013, and stands accused by his domestic opponents, the United States and the European Union of corruption, human rights violations and rigging his 2018 re-election.

Justice Department has decided not to open a civil rights investigation into nursing homes in New York and two other states regarding their COVID-19 response, dealing a blow to several Republican lawmakers who had demanded a probe.

One underlying issue is whether three states with Democratic governors - New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania - inadvertently added to the coronavirus death toll in the early stages of the pandemic by allowing nursing homes to take in residents who had been hospitalized for COVID-19.

Representative Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, the Justice Department said it had reviewed information provided by the states and, based on that data, it was not opening a civil rights investigation into "any public nursing facility within New York, Pennsylvania, or Michigan at this time.".

Asked earlier this week if there is a Covid-19 data point that would push the state to reimplement restrictions, California Gov.