FILE - In this March 26, 2021, file photo, a member of the Philadelphia Fire Department administers the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine to a person at a vaccination site at a Salvation Army location in Philadelphia. More Black Americans say they are open to taking the coronavirus vaccine amid campaigns to overcome a shared historical distrust of science and government.
Scott LaMar has worked in both radio and television for more than four decades.
Currently, LaMar is the Host and Executive Producer of The Spark program on WITF-FM, 89.5 & 93.3 in Harrisburg, Pa.
Previously, LaMar was WITF TV’s Sr. Public Affairs producer and produced the station’s award-winning weekly public affairs TV program, Smart Talk.
In addition to his on-air duties, LaMar has moderated political candidate debates, including those for candidates running for Pennsylvania governor and the U.S. Senate and was a regular contributor to BBC World News TV before and after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.
LaMar often emcees or moderates local events and has gone as far as California to emcee a national event.
The American Society of Civil Engineers honored LaMar with their national Excellence in Journalism award in 2020. He has been nominated for five Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards.
LaMar and The Spark have been recognized throughout the Central Pennsylvania community including ADVOZ Lancaster’s “Dignity in Dialogue Award”, the South-Central Assembly’s “Regional Citizen Award” and was named a “Humanitarian Hero” by The Humane Society of the United States/Pennsylvania.
A native of Coatesville, Pa., LaMar has also worked as a broadcast news anchor, sports play-by-play announcer and manager.
Matt Rourke / AP Photo
FILE - In this March 26, 2021, file photo, a member of the Philadelphia Fire Department administers the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine to a person at a vaccination site at a Salvation Army location in Philadelphia. More Black Americans say they are open to taking the coronavirus vaccine amid campaigns to overcome a shared historical distrust of science and government.
Airdate: March 20, 2023
So many of us have moved on from the COVID-19 pandemic after three years and have gotten back to normal or at least accepted a new normal. That’s even though 250,000 American died from COVID last year.
A Penn State researcher says the new normal could be 90,000 to 120,000 deaths from COVID every year, unless more Americans get vaccinated – every year. That’s compared to the high end of influenza deaths, which is about 50,000 a year.
On The Spark Monday, Dr. Maciej Boni, an associate professor of biology at Penn State University said only about 39% of Americans have been vaccinated against COVID in the last 12 months and those vaccination figures are what he’s basing his estimate on,”The primary determinant, really the only important determinant of how many COVID cases, how many COVID hospitalizations and deaths we’re going to see this year is COVID vaccination. And, of course, every country, every region, every state decides this differently. But the difference between being 100% vaccinated and 0% vaccinated is enormous. If we get vaccination rates up into the 80 to 90% range, maybe we could quash COVID to the point where it’s millions of cases and thousands or perhaps 10,000 deaths a year. But if we relax fully and just tell everybody to stop getting vaccinated, and that worst case scenario, which I don’t think we’re going to do, but in that worst case scenario, we could get up into the multiple hundreds of thousands of deaths again.”
Dr. Boni was asked why he thinks more people aren’t getting vaccinated,”I think there’s two main reasons. One is that I don’t think the CDC has put enough effort into promoting and underlining the importance of vaccination. So this was done for other infectious diseases. This was done for measles, for example, in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And we don’t have problems with measles vaccination coverage. Kids get measles shots before they’re one year old. They get measles boosters, which are just measles vaccines before they go to school. And we’re quite successful at getting these coverage levels very high. The CDC does a good job of promoting it, and we don’t have any problems around it. So one basic problem is that the CDC hasn’t planned or started a campaign to get this number up to the 90% range. I think the second problem is the disinformation that we have encountered over the last three years. So COVID is unique in that for no other infectious disease have we seen this level of coordinated disinformation campaigns getting into people’s social media feeds, getting into the press, getting into the mouths of TV personalities. And this, I think, has caused a lot of distrust in people. So one important thing, I don’t know how this is going to be done, but one important thing is to beat back a lot of the disinformation that I think has caused people to worry.”