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Teen creates a website for his friends to deliver groceries to seniors. And business is booming.

Seniors need help. School's out. Makes total sense.

via 60s Folks / Twitter

This article originally appeared on 03.26.20


The elderly have the most to worry about during the COVID-19 pandemic. If infected by the virus they have the highest mortality rate. So, obviously, they have a big reason to stay home and practice social distancing during the crisis.

Teenagers have a much lower risk of dying from the COVID-19, and in California, high school isn't in session for weeks, if not months.

So Daniel Goldberg, a junior student-athlete at San Marcos High in Santa Barbara put two and two together and got his friends together to help the elderly.

Daniel created Zoomers to Boomers, a website where seniors in the Santa Barbara area can fill out a list online and have their groceries delivered the next day by one of his high school friends.

The site's name is a generational play on words, the delivery people are all Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) and the recipients are mostly Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964).

Gen Z volunteering

Teens are delivering groceries to seniors in need

via Zoomers to Boomers

"The first week off school I was just spending time with siblings, and I was trying to follow all the regulations of isolate at home, don't go out and spread anything around," Daniel told Santa Barbara's Noozhawk.

"I felt I wasn't helping when there was help that was needed," he added.

Daniel was inspired to create the website because of his father, an ER doctor at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.

"I saw my dad (Dr. Brian Goldberg) going into work at the ER every day and he was putting himself out on the front line," Daniel said. "I was just sitting at home twiddling my thumbs. I was like: 'There has to be something I can do to try help out in the community.' I started thinking and brainstorming on how I can help."

By Tuesday, Daniel had put together a staff of 13 high school kids to do the zooming. Many of them are fellow athletes at his school. The Zoomers must adhere to strict standards of sanitation and wear an N95 mask and gloves.

"All these people are people I'm comfortable asking, 'Do you want to help?'" he said. "They're friends from school and water polo, people I know."

The great thing for seniors is that Zoomers to Boomers is free. The Zoomers don't accept any payment for their orders and tips are donated to those in need in Santa Barbara county.

The project has been so successful it's already spread to Denver, Colorado.

The site is simple to use. Customers click an "order here" tab to create a grocery list. Then drivers visit a local grocery store and fulfill the order. After the items have been purchased, the delivery person calls or texts the customer and tells them how much it cost and when it will be delivered.

Customers can pay through cash, check, or Venmo.

"They answer all the information we need and we send a driver out and we'll have (the grocery) order to them by the next morning," Daniel said. "For the non-tech savvy, they can send me an email. I can call a couple of people and make the delivery."

Business is taking off quickly. On Tuesday, Daniel's team fulfilled 50 orders, so he's looking to hire more Zoomers.

"I'm going to try to grow the team a little more," he said.

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A funeral home truck in North Carolina is telling future customers not to get vaccinated

@MeidasTouch/Twitter

Since three coronavirus vaccines received emergency use authorization from the FDA early in 2021, the question of how to get a high percentage of the population vaccinated has haunted public health officials. As hospitals across the country fill with severely ill COVID-19 patients, the vast majority of whom are unvaccinated, the question remains.

A funeral home in North Carolina is taking a unique tack in advocating for vaccinations, one that's striking and to-the-point.

A truck advertised as Wilmore Funeral Home drove around Bank of America Stadium before the Carolina Panthers football game in Charlotte over the weekend, and it had a simple message: "Don't get vaccinated."

That message wouldn't be fitting from any other business, but from a funeral home, it's a morbidly appropriate joke. If you don't get vaccinated, they'll get more business. Blunt, but perhaps effective.

If you go to the Wilmore Funeral Home website, it's simply a landing page that says, "Get vaccinated. If not, see you soon." Again, blunt. If you click the "Get vaccinated" box, the page takes you to the StarMed Healthcare website where you can find places to get vaccinated in the Charlotte area.

According to the Charlotte Observer, the identity behind the truck is a mystery. There is no Wilmore Funeral Home, and StarMed Healthcare said it isn't behind it.

"If this saves one person's life by getting vaccinated, I'm 100% for it," Dr. Arin Piramzadian, chief medical officer at StarMed Healthcare, told the Observer.

"We know that 99% of people who are ending up in the hospital and dying are unvaccinated," Piramzadian said. "If that statistic does not scare people... I'm not sure what does. Perhaps a dark humor aspect such as this one does catch someone's attention."

It's hard to say what will convince people at this point, since asking nicely and asking not so nicely doesn't seem to be working, and loud and proud misinformation mongers seem to drown out legitimate educational efforts. Maybe seeing statistics from hospitals showing how many more unvaccinated patients are in the ICU will convince people. Or maybe seeing a funeral truck with an invitation to bring them more business will do it.

Either way, clever move. Well done, whoever you are.

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Thrift store worker finds a polio vaccine card from 1956. Sure looks familiar, doesn't it?

@interest_mild/Twitter

Vaccines are without a doubt one of the most impactful scientific advancements in human history. Through vaccines, we eliminated smallpox, have nearly eliminated polio worldwide, and have saved countless lives through protection from a host of other infectious diseases. Yet even with that history, millions of Americans are refusing the coronavirus vaccines and decrying efforts to mandate proof of vaccination to partake in certain activities.

A Twitter post is serving as a timely reminder that vaccination isn't new and neither are proof-of-immunization requirements. The post shows a polio record card from 1956 that the poster found at the thrift store where they work. And the real kicker here is that COVID is actually far deadlier than polio ever was.

COVID-19 has killed nearly 670,000 Americans in the past year and a half. We are just days away from surpassing the death toll from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Those numbers are staggering in comparison with the polio epidemic, which at its peak in 1952, killed 3,000 Americans in one year. Thousands more were paralyzed, but nowhere near hundreds of thousands in the span of a year.

I'm not trying to downplay polio—it's a terrible disease. It was especially scary because primarily impacted children, but by every other measure, the COVID pandemic is far worse than the polio epidemic ever was. In deaths, there's no comparison. In long-term effects, we simply don't know yet. COVID isn't leaving people paralyzed like polio did, but "long COVID" is a thing and organ damage caused by COVID can lead to a host of ongoing health problems.

People downplay COVID by saying most people who get the virus don't get severely sick, but the same is true of polio. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, around 70% of polio cases are totally asymptomic, and another 25% have just mild symptoms. Less than 1% of cases result in paralysis, and far fewer result in death.

And yet, we never hear people say, "We should just take our chances with polio, since most people who get it are fine!" We still vaccinate for it, even though the chances of getting it in the U.S. is practically nil at this point because vaccination has eradicated it.

Some people don't trust the coronavirus vaccines because they think they were approved for use too quickly. But do you know how long it was between the start of clinical trials for the polio vaccine to when it was approved? Less than a year. Clinical trials for the Salk polio vaccine began on 1.8 million children (650,000 of whom got the vaccine, with 1.2 million getting a placebo) on April 26, 1954 and the vaccine was approved April 12, 1955. It wasn't without controversy, of course, but the success of the vaccine speaks for itself.

That was nearly seven decades ago. Think of how far medical research has come since then and how much greater our understanding of infectious disease and immunology is now. We already had enormous amounts of base knowledge about coronaviruses in general, decades of mRNA research under our belt, and more than a decade of mRNA vaccine development already underway, so the quickly developed and tested COVID vaccines are not terribly surprising.

As for proof of vaccination complaints, the polio card post also prompted a flood of other photos of immunization "passports," from record books to reminders that people with smallpox inoculations had to literally show the scar on their arm to prove that they'd been vaccinated.

The military has been required to get vaccines for pretty much ever.

And yes, people with smallpox vaccinations used to have to lift their shirt sleeves to show that they'd been immunized before being allowed to enter some public places.

Sometimes a "vaccine passport" is literally called a vaccine passport. And many jobs have long required them.

One of the unfortunate side effects of living in the information age is that we spend so much time battling misinformation. I recall predictions from disease specialists in March 2020 that we may lose 100,000 to 200,000 Americans to COVID-19, and people scoffing about fearmongering. Here we are 18 months and 680,000 deaths later, still having to convince people that COVID is real, the pandemic is serious, vaccination is good, and requiring proof of immunization for life-threatening infectious disease is not an authoritarian power-grab.

If you're immunized for polio, which you most probably are, being immunized for coronavirus should be a no brainer. The risk of COVID is much higher, the vaccines have had ample time for testing in comparison to the early days of polio immunization, and the vaccines have been proven safe and effective according to the vast majority of people who are qualified to evaluate such things.

We're all tired of this stupid pandemic. Please do your part and get vaccinated if you are able.

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The Pfizer vaccine gets full FDA approval, eliminating a primary argument for not getting it

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash, Andy Slavitt/Twitter

The FDA has given full approval for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, marking a major milestone in the fight against the global coronavirus pandemic.

Since FDA Emergency Use Authorization was issued for the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines earlier this year, some hesitant people have refused to get the vaccine, citing the fact that it wasn't fully approved by the FDA. Now that full FDA approval has been granted for the Pfizer vaccine (which is actually officially named Comirnaty—who knew?), that argument is moot. And with Moderna's approval submission clocking about a month after Pfizer, it's entirely likely we'll have two fully approved vaccines for COVID-19 in the coming weeks.

The big question now is—will it actually make that much difference?

On the hopeful side, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 31% of unvaccinated Americans they surveyed last month indicated that they would be more likely to get vaccinated if the vaccine received full FDA approval. If all of those people changed their minds due to this approval, we'd have millions more Americans receiving the vaccine. With hospitals filling up with unvaccinated people across the country, putting a heavy strain on already burnt-out healthcare workers, getting more people vaccinated is imperative.

But even full approval doesn't seem to be budging the die-hard never-vaxxers.

A small-but-loud minority of Americans simply have a blanket distrust of the FDA (or any government regulatory agency), and this full approval is just seen as another untrustworthy move by an untrusted source. Social media today is filled with people asking how much the FDA was paid to give this full approval. Figuring out how to reach these people is an ongoing mystery.

Another minority of Americans are immersed in media that pushes misinformation about the vaccines and the pandemic in general, leading people to the erroneous belief that they're better off risking a COVID infection than getting the vaccine. Though COVID misinformation can be outright lies, more often it's studies or statistics or stories that are cherry-picked and used in misleading ways. (Watch the comments on this article if you read it on Facebook. There will be no shortage of such misinformation being shared. Happens every time.)

One example of such misleading information is reports of the number of vaccine reactions in VAERS, the U.S. government's Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. If a person were to just look at the numbers in that database (which is available for anyone to see) without proper analysis, they could easily believe that the vaccines were dangerous, leading to thousands of people's deaths and sickening thousands more.

However VAERS numbers have to be taken for what they are—self-reported, unverified reactions that 1) may not be real or accurate since anyone can submit to it, and 2) have not been demonstrated to actually be caused by the vaccine.

Here's one example of why raw VAERS numbers are essentially meaningless: When we're vaccinating more than 100 million people in a handful of months, basic statistics would tell us that a certain number of those people will die of out-of-the-blue heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, or other sudden death events within a close window of receiving the vaccine, even though such events actually have nothing to do with the vaccine.

Here's how that math works: According to the American Public Health Association, around 2,200 Americans die each day of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases every day. That's about one person every 40 seconds, and that's in years when there's not a mass vaccination effort happening. At the peak of vaccinations in April, the U.S. was administering over 1,300 vaccine doses every 40 seconds. Statistically, it's completely expected that some sudden deaths would coincide closely with a vaccine dose—but that doesn't mean that the vaccine caused them. Doctors investigate all reported deaths following vaccines, and there is simply no indication that vaccines are causing people to die or be severely impacted in any statistically significant way.

One might assume that the FDA's pause of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for safety review when a correlation between the vaccine and a higher than normal incidence of rare, severe (but treatable) blood clots was discovered would have given people some faith that the safety monitoring systems work as they should. But memories are short and paranoia is high. Add in the fact that we're watching science happen in real-time, and that accurate information and guidance have changed many times as we've learned more, and it's not surprising that a lot of people simply don't know what to think anymore.

While this full FDA approval won't convince everyone who is hesitant to get the vaccine, hopefully it will convince some. (For those still on the fence, you can read the FDA insert that will now accompany the Pfizer vaccine here and an FAQ about the vaccine and the approval of it here.)

As always, look to the majority of experts in the epidemiology/virology/immunology fields for accurate information and ignore the handful of skeptics-with-credentials who thrive on social media attention and feed on people's distrust of institutions and authority. And for the love, run from anyone who says, "Do your own research," unless you actually have the expertise and ability to conduct clinical research. (For real, watching YouTube videos and searching hashtags on Twitter does not count.)

Let's celebrate the incredible medical feat of the world's top medical scientists during the pandemic, do our part to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, and get the free, widely available, and now fully FDA-approved vaccine as soon as possible.

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