Getting Vaccinated Will (and Won't) Change My Behavior

By Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker

17 December 20

The shot will make me less worried about getting the virus—but I’ll still fear passing it on to others.

eyond the dread that I feel for my patients, my work as a physician on the coronavirus wards has instilled in me two related fears. The first fear, which surges each time I learn about another of the nearly two thousand health-care workers who have died of COVID-19, is that I will get infected and fall seriously ill. A second, deeper and more persistent, fear is that I will pass the virus to my family. It’s because of this concern that I still isolate from them while caring for coronavirus patients.

Like other doctors in my hospital, I’ll be getting vaccinated sometime in the next week or two. I’ve spent some time thinking about how this will change my behavior and state of mind. Getting the shot will put the first fear to rest: we know for sure that the vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna prevent severe illness in almost all people who are inoculated. But it won’t eliminate the second fear, because we’re not yet certain that the vaccines can prevent people from becoming infected or infecting others. It’s a distinction with a difference.

Consider the H.P.V. vaccine. It’s extraordinarily effective at reducing genital warts and cervical cancer in women who get inoculated; it has also, happily, driven down the incidence of H.P.V. among unvaccinated men, because, in addition to preventing illness, it stops vaccinated people from contracting, then transmitting the virus to others. Many vaccines, including those for measles and chicken pox, work this way. But others, such as the new shot against meningitis, don’t. That shot reduces the chances that vaccinated people will get sick, but it doesn’t do much to stop the spread of Neisseria meningitidis, the bacteria that causes meningitis, from one person to the next.

At the moment, we don’t know how the new coronavirus vaccines will affect transmission. While conducting their clinical trials, Pfizer and Moderna tracked how many vaccinated people got sick with COVID-19; they didn’t study whether the virus infected them. It’s possible that inoculated people in the trial caught the coronavirus, but that the vaccine prevented them from developing symptoms. If that happened, it would hardly lessen the astonishing nature of these vaccines, which have been developed in record time and prevent illness with an efficacy that was unthinkable just a few months ago. But it would mean that vaccinated individuals, without getting sick themselves, could give the virus to unvaccinated people—that is, to the majority of Americans, for months to come.

Both Pfizer and Moderna are studying the question. They plan to test the blood of trial participants for antibodies against a coronavirus protein called nucleocapsid, or N; because people only develop antibodies to this protein after they’ve been infected naturally, scientists should be able to establish for certain whether participants caught the virus after immunization. Right now, all we have are clues. According to documents submitted to the F.D.A., Moderna tested volunteers for the virus before the second dose, and found fewer asymptomatic cases among those who’d received it compared with those who hadn’t—an encouraging, but by no means conclusive, sign of interrupted viral transmission. And in November, Oxford issued a hopeful press release indicating that preliminary analyses had found a reduction in asymptomatic infections among its trial participants; this suggests that the vaccine it’s developing with AstraZeneca may reduce or prevent transmission, too. Again, though, final results have not been released or peer-reviewed.

In the worst-case scenario, in which the vaccines don’t halt infection directly, they could still make it less likely: by lessening the virus-spraying symptoms of infection—coughing and sneezing—they will insure that fewer respiratory droplets fly out of the noses and mouths of infected people. On the other hand, the risk of spread might grow if, after they are vaccinated, people mistakenly act as though they are no longer capable of hosting contagion. Since the beginning of the pandemic, planners have talked about using “immunity passports”—certifications of vaccination or prior infection—to allow immune individuals to work and travel as they wish. But, until we know for sure that vaccinated people cannot contract and spread the virus, such schemes are premature: a gathering of inoculated people could very well be a superspreader event, endangering the many unvaccinated people to whom they’re connected.

The answers will come. Early in the pandemic, we knew that wearing a mask made you less likely to spread the virus; it took time to confirm that masks protect wearers, too. With vaccines, the order is reversed: we know that an immunized person is protected, and hope to find that vaccination will also protect other, unvaccinated people. Until that’s confirmed, getting vaccinated should change very little about one’s behavior. While waiting for new data to come in, or for those around me to get vaccinated, I’ll continue wearing full protective gear when caring for patients. And I’ll keep avoiding close contact with friends and loved ones who aren’t vaccinated. I’ll become less worried for myself, but stay worried for everyone else.

In a way, it’s a painful decision. Like all of us, I desperately want life to return to normal. But, this week, the pandemic death toll in the United States passed three hundred thousand; if the current rate of death continues, it could pass four hundred thousand by the end of January. The vaccines are miraculous, and I’m grateful for them. But, for now, we need to keep protecting one another by using the social tools—masks, distance, and, sometimes, isolation—that we know for certain can work.

A New Bill Aims to End Police Raids Like the One That Killed Breonna Taylor

By Alice Speri, The Intercept

17 December 20

Legislation introduced in New York this week is the latest, most ambitious effort to keep police from breaking into people’s homes.

he police killing of Breonna Taylor, who was fatally shot in Kentucky in March when plainclothes officers barged into her apartment in the middle of the night, has set off a series of state and local efforts to ban “no-knock” raids — the police practice of breaking into someone’s home unannounced to execute a search warrant. A bill introduced by New York state legislators on Thursday goes further than most of those efforts, seeking to not only ban the vast majority of no-knock raids, but also strictly limit other avenues for forcible entry by police.

The New York bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Brian Benjamin and James Sanders Jr. and Assembly Member Daniel J. O’Donnell, seeks to limit the use of unannounced, no-knock raids to the most severe circumstances, like the pursuit of a murder suspect or incidents involving active shooters, hostage-taking, terrorism, or human trafficking. It would ban the issuance of no-knock warrants aimed exclusively at searching for drugs, currently the most common use of these heavily militarized raids. But unlike other current and draft state and local legislation, as well as three federal proposals, the New York bill would also impose a host of restrictions on what are known as “knock-and-announce” search warrants, a more common type of forcible entry that has led to dozens of deadly encounters in recent years.

“We must stop the over militarization of our communities,” Sanders said in a statement. “Today, we are putting forth the most comprehensive, groundbreaking legislation in the nation when it comes to these police raids, which should only be used under extreme circumstances and with accountability.”

While there is no comprehensive data on these raids, a New York Times investigation found that at least 94 people, including 13 officers, were killed during forcible police entries between 2010 and 2016 nationwide. Officers executing warrants have killed children and elderly people. Many people have been injured as a result of police firing flashbang devices into a home before entering, once severely burning a baby in his playpen. Oftentimes police have conducted these raids based on flawed or old intelligence, breaking into the wrong home and killing people who were not their intended target for arrest, as in Taylor’s case.

Researchers have estimated that at least 20,000 no-knock warrants are authorized by courts every year, the vast majority of them against Black and brown people and aimed at finding illegal drugs. But as many as 60,000 warrants a year end up playing out like no-knock warrants, even if not authorized as such. That is because the line between court-approved unannounced raids and raids in which police are legally required to knock and announce themselves is often blurry in practice, and most raids turn into what are known as “quick-knocks,” during which police announce themselves and break in almost simultaneously.

“For years, I was on a drug unit that would, even if there wasn’t a no-knock, get out of the car and go up to the door and whisper ‘police search warrant’ and then smash the door in,” Jim Nolan, a former Delaware police lieutenant and FBI unit chief turned sociologist, told The Intercept. “That’s just bad behavior. The no-knock warrant is a way to legitimize something that’s very dangerous.”

Brian Dolan, a criminal defense attorney who has studied the practice, warned of the “gray area” between no-knock and knock-and-announce warrants.

“A lot of times you’ll see that the police will sort of knock on the door very quickly while simultaneously saying ‘police,’ but not saying it loud enough for anyone to hear,” he told The Intercept. “And then they are waiting just a few seconds before breaking the door down, without giving anyone inside enough time to respond.”

The officers who broke into Taylor’s home in Louisville shortly after midnight on March 13 had received initial court approval — based on months-old intelligence — to execute a no-knock raid to search for illegal drugs and to arrest someone who did not live there. Before the raid was carried out, the court changed its order to require the officers to knock and announce themselves, which they claim they did. That claim was disputed by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who shot at the officers believing they were intruders.

While some details of the shooting remain contested, the incident exposed the dangers of most forcible warrant executions and the difficulty of proving that police did knock and announce themselves as required before breaking down a door and barging into someone’s home with their weapons drawn.

In fact, while after Taylor’s death activists and legislators focused on calling for bans on no-knock raids, it’s unlikely that such a ban would have prevented her killing. What might have is a sweeping overhaul of the way all police search warrants are conducted. So far, the New York bill is the most ambitious attempt to do that.

Breonna’s Law

After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May brought belated nationwide awareness to the killing of Taylor in Kentucky earlier this year, calls for banning no-knocks echoed from the streets to city and state legislative chambers across the country.

In June, the Louisville Metro Council voted unanimously in favor of an ordinance, known as “Breonna’s Law,” banning no-knock raids and imposing some restrictions on other search warrant executions, like a requirement that police wear body cameras throughout them. At least eight states and 14 cities have partial no-knock bans in place, and legislation imposing a range of restrictions on search warrants is underway in 18 cities and 21 states, according to a tracker by Campaign Zero, a group focused on law enforcement policy. But both existing and proposed bills vary widely in the discretion they allow police, and most fall far short of what advocates say is necessary to meaningfully curb the harm caused when a SWAT team breaks into a home.

“What a lot of cities and states are doing is banning the issuance of no-knocks and full stop,” Katie Ryan, who works with Campaign Zero, told The Intercept. “It’s a nice hashtag but actually, in practice, it does not prevent this practice of no-knock raids.”

Earlier this month, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed the state’s own “Breonna’s Law,” after a special legislative session focused on criminal justice reform called in response to this summer’s racial justice protests. Virginia became the third state to ban no-knock raids, after Oregon and Florida.

The Virginia bill also imposed restrictions on other search warrant executions, most notably by limiting searches to daylight hours. But the version of the bill that was signed into law does not require officers to record the raid nor to wait a set amount of time after having announced themselves and before breaking into a home. Lashrecse Aird, a Virginia House delegate and the bill’s sponsor, had strongly advocated for the latter provision. “The 30-second pause ensures that you really give people on the other side of that door or that you are coming in contact with the opportunity to deliberately decide how they are about to engage with you, and to just take note that someone’s at the door, and to orient themselves and decide how they’re going to respond,” Aird told The Intercept.

Discussion of the 30-second requirement threatened to derail the entire bill, with critics arguing that the rule would put officers’ lives in danger — and proponents countering that it would actually make them, and everyone else in the home, safer. “It was framed as trying to tell police officers how to do their job,” said Aird. “But I would say, any other state that is considering this type of policy, they should push for that.”

The New York bill introduced this week does include a 30-second wait time provision, as well as a host of other restrictions on all warrant executions.

In addition to banning most no-knock warrants, the bill would create a tougher application process for police seeking authorization for all other warrants, including requiring officers to list the age and gender of all occupants of a home they seek to raid and asking them to detail their planned course of action should nobody respond when they knock. Officers seeking a warrant would need to provide evidence obtained within the last 24 hours showing that the person they are looking for was present at the residence to be searched, and the warrant would only be valid for a week. The bill would also require the officers to be in uniform, limit the execution of raids to daytime, and ban the use of flashbang devices to enter a home. It would require officers to record the entirety of the raid and mandate a process to review a raid after completion, including independent oversight and mechanisms to hold individual officers accountable over their failure to comply with regulations. Finally, the bill would make any evidence acquired in violation of these regulations inadmissible in court, require police to pay restitution for property damaged during the raid, and prohibit police from keeping assets seized during the raid in the absence of a criminal conviction.

During a Thursday press conference introducing the bill, Benjamin, the state senator, said “there are too many citizens who live in fear.”

“If you showed up in plainclothes at my house in the middle of the night, and banged on my door and break my door down, I don’t know who you are. And just because you say that you’re the police, that doesn’t tell me anything; that’s your word against mine. I have no idea who’s in my house,” Benjamin said. “New York can be the leading voice for how we get this done across the country.”

Warrior Cops

No-knock warrants were first enacted at the federal level in 1970, as part of President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs. Congress repealed the provision authorizing them a few years later, as evidence mounted about the danger they posed and questions swirled about their constitutionality. But as the drug war ramped up in the following decades, no-knocks became increasingly frequent, and a series of Supreme Court decisions over the years effectively enabled states to continue to authorize them. Since then, the number of raids conducted every year has only ballooned, increasing by nearly 2,000 percent, from 1,500 annually in the early 1980s to about 45,000 in 2010.

“At one point in time we accepted that this was a bad idea, and then over time our attitude about it changed, and we started doing it again, and we never looked back,” said Dolan. “We became a country that’s obsessed with the war on drugs, and we decided we’re pretty much going to let police do whatever they want to try to get drugs off the street.”

In fact, no-knock raids have been criticized even by some within law enforcement, who argue that they unnecessarily put officers’ lives at risk. “My son is in law enforcement, and I do not want him to get hurt, shot, killed while serving a warrant when it wasn’t necessary,” Mark Lomax, the former executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, told HuffPost. The police chief in Chesterfield County, Virginia, said that his department hadn’t executed no-knock warrants in decades, according to Aird, because “as a law enforcement agency, we should respect people enough to allow them to decide how they are going to engage with law enforcement,” she said.

But despite the enormous risks, forcible raids have remained a widespread police tactic because of a broader culture of militarization and violence that critics say can’t be reformed with stricter policies alone.

“They thrive on this adrenaline rush, and this thin blue line mentality, and this paramilitary perspective; they’re at war,” said Nolan, the former Delaware cop. “And there are rewards for it. You’re running and gunning, you’re doing search warrants, you’re making lockups, and all these types of things are extremely valued in the profession.”

By making the bureaucratic process to obtain a warrant more burdensome on officers, and by eliminating incentives — like police’s ability to keep property seized during raids to subsidize their departments’ budgets — those pushing for a rewriting of the rulebook on police raids hope to tackle the broader war-like culture with which these raids have become so entangled.

But as banning no-knock warrants alone is not enough, some argue that imposing restrictions on all warrants, while certain to have a greater impact, is also only a first step. Aird, the Virginia delegate, noted that prior to Breonna’s Law, there was no statewide regulation for how police should conduct warrant searches at all. “In many states, like in Virginia, their code is just absolutely silent on no-knocks and how search warrants are executed generally,” she said. “And while no-knocks in my opinion really needed to be banned, it really is just the start of the conversation that we need to have.”