October 18, 2021

Yes, Colin Powell Was Fully Vaccinated. He Was Also Seriously Immunocompromised.

Anti-vaxxers are having a field day with Powell’s death.

Shawn Baldwin/Getty

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Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, has died from complications of COVID-19 at age 84. The news of Powell’s death only broke a few hours ago, but anti-vaccine groups are already having a field day. Instead of mourning the passing of an accomplished soldier and leader, they’re fixating on the fact that Powell was fully vaccinated. The crucial bit that they’re leaving out: Colin Powell suffered from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood that significantly weakens the immune system.

Fox News host Will Cain went on a rant this morning, saying “the fully-vaccinated people are being hospitalized and fully-vaccinated are dying from Covid.” Fox News host John Roberts tweeted that Powell’s death was evidence of vaccines’ waning efficacy. (He later deleted the tweet.) 

Other rightwing media personalities jumped on the bandwagon: 

Adding to the swarm, anti-vaccine activists are already claiming that Powell would have survived if he had been treated with the ant-parasitic drug ivermectin.

It’s not just anti-vaccine groups and rightwing media: Major news outlets ran headlines about Powell dying from COVID-19 even though he was fully vaccinated—but neglected to mention that he was immunocompromised. 

Anti-vaccine groups will certainly latch onto these headlines, but even more worrisome is the likelihood that people who are still deciding whether to be vaccinated could see these stories and come away with the false impression that vaccines are useless. 

Here’s another bit of nuance that I haven’t seen anyone really talking about but seems the most significant: The reason Colin Powell died of COVID-19 is that he caught it—which meant that it was still circulating among people he had contact with. This point may seem obvious, but too often we forget that one of the greatest risk factors for contracting COVID-19 is community spread. The more people around you who have the disease, the more likely you are to catch it. The best way to drive down community transmission is to boost vaccination rates. If more people in the United States were fully vaccinated, we likely wouldn’t be dealing with outbreaks at this scale nearly two years into the pandemic. 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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