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The importance of vaccinations

It’s late fall and all the seasonal illnesses are making their rounds: colds, flu, COVID, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and other respiratory viruses and infections. Unfortunately, modern medicine doesn’t have a preventative vaccine for everything that ails us, but it’s important we get the vaccines they do have. New dominant strains of COVID mean it’s time for a booster shot, especially as cold weather forces us indoors. Flu shots are imperfect, but it never hurts to get one. And most pharmacies will let you get the COVID and flu vaccines in one shot (metaphorically, ...

Justice set us up for financial crisis

Recently, The Dominion Post Editorial Board met with Kelly Allen from the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, and she taught us a few things about how the state’s budget works (or, as is sometimes the case, doesn’t work). Unlike many other states, the governor of West Virginia has the constitutional power to set the state’s budget for the coming fiscal year, which is based on its revenue estimates. It is up to the governor’s office to set the “size of the pie,” or the total dollar amount. The Legislature then decides how that money gets divvied up for the year. ...

It’s becoming more dangerous to be a journalist

Good reporting depends on the bravery of good journalists who are willing to venture into unsafe places in order to get real and real-time information. War zones have always been a dangerous place for journalists, but the battle between the Israeli government and Hamas has been a particularly bloody one for reporters. As of this writing, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports 42 journalists and media workers have died in Gaza and the surrounding region since Oct. 7. Of those killed, 37 were Palestinian, four were Israeli and one was Lebanese. Most of the Israeli journalists ...

Natural disasters unnaturally severe

At the time of this writing, there were 21 fires burning over 11,000 acres in West Virginia, according to the Fire, Weather and Avalanche Center. The four largest are the Steep Valley fire in the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, which has burned over 2,000 acres; the Coal Creek fire in Kanawha County, near the Boone County border, roughly 2,500 acres; the Left Fork of Long Bottom Creek fire, due north of the Coal Creek fire, around 2,400 acres; and the Glen Alum fire in Mingo County, near the Kentucky border, over 1,000 acres. The Steep Valley fire is the one garnering the ...

The war’s second front

As the wars between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas rage on, there is a secondary war being waged — on information and truth. As Kyle Chayka, a staff reporter for The New Yorker, recently noted, this is the second so-called “TikTok war” in recent years. The first was when the war in Ukraine started and everyday people became citizen journalists, reporting on the bloody conflict in real time. But as Chayka points out, social media and technology have changed drastically in the last year and a part. First, the major social media companies now intentionally deprioritize ...

Today, we honor those who served

Veterans Day is both for the living and the deceased. As we thank our service men and women for their service, courage and sacrifice, we also pay homage to the memory and legacy of veterans who are no longer with us. Veterans Day began as Armistice Day, in recognition of the armistice reached at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 that halted the fighting in World War I. In 1938, Nov. 11 became an official holiday to honor the surviving servicemen of the “war to end all wars” and remember those who had passed. But then there was World War II. And the Korean ...