Month: March 2021

I was sad to learn actor Yaphet Kotto has passed away at age 81. Most of the headlines today are along the lines of “Yaphet Kotto, star of Live & Let Die…” Well yes, his “Mr. Big” was one of the more memorable Bond villains, but that was hardly his defining role! His other big-screen credits included Nothing But a Man, Across 110th Street, Blue Collar, Alien, Brubaker and Midnight Run. He was also an accomplished stage actor.

He had a stereotype-shattering role as Lt. Al Giardello on David Simon’s brilliant police procedural series “Homicide” (1993-1999) which showcased his considerable acting chops.

My favorite Yaphet Kotto feature film performance is in Paul Schrader’s 1978 drama Blue Collar (co-written by his brother Leonard). Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Kotto portray Detroit auto workers tired of getting the short end of the stick from both their employer and their union. In a fit of drunken pique, they pull an ill-advised caper that gets them in trouble with both parties, ultimately putting friendship and loyalty to the test. 

Akin to Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, Schrader subverts the standard black-and-white “union good guy, company bad guy” trope with shades of gray, reminding us the road to Hell is sometimes paved with good intentions. Great score by Jack Nitzsche and Ry Cooder, with a memorable theme song featuring Captain Beefheart (“I’m jest a hard-woikin’, fucked-over man…”).

Kotto was also a good sport. In 1994 he appeared “as himself” as part of this fascinating social experiment conducted by Michael Moore for his 1-season series TV Nation. This bit presages the “prank with a point” that has become stock-in-trade for Sacha Baron Cohen.

Same as it ever was. Rest in peace, big man.

I was wondering about this the other day. I recall that the vaccine rollout was very delayed and slowed a couple of months ago and then it picked up dramatically. TPM reports on what happened:

It seemed like the vaccine would take up to a year to arrive.

Back in January, even though two COVID-19 mRNA vaccines had been authorized for emergency use and were being distributed, forecasts of when the shots would be available to the general public stretched deep into autumn 2021.

Distribution was slow, and that period — the final weeks of the Trump administration — left a pall hanging over the vaccine distribution effort.

Since then, however, the operation has turned around. What started off at hundreds of thousands of doses per day has steadily increased to more than two million per day.

New funding for state distribution, an increased federal presence in the distribution process under the Biden administration, and time to iron out kinks that appeared at the local level have all allowed the pace of vaccinations to go from a few hundred thousand a day up to 2.4 million a day.

“I don’t really know what the Trump administration had in mind or what they were planning as far as the vaccine, we only know what they said, which wasn’t a comprehensive vision,” Claire Hannan, head of the Association of Immunization Managers, told TPM.

Experts described money as the biggest problem early in the vaccination campaign and the area in which actions by Congress and the Biden administration made the biggest difference in upping the speed at which Americans are vaccinated.

That problem stretched from the federal level on down to the local, with national associations representing vaccinators and public health departments demanding throughout 2020 that Congress appropriate money for the effort as local public health officials, like Guilford County, North Carolina’s Iulia Vann, tried to budget their way forward without being certain how much money would come.

“It’s disheartening to see that we don’t have that support to do our work without having to worry,” Vann told TPM in December.

Congress passed $8 billion in funding for vaccine distribution in the last days of December, and appropriated an additional $7.5 billion in the American Rescue Plan.

Part of the money has gone toward remedying long-standing problems like nursing and vaccinator shortages, allowing states and cities to scoop up and train people to do the inoculating.

But the Biden administration has also added capacity through national guard deployments and FEMA sites.

It’s a marked difference from the Trump administration’s strategy which, Hannan told TPM, focused on “enrolling private providers and that’s clearly not enough when you’re trying to vaccinate millions of people a day.”

The Biden administration has also ordered FEMA to reimburse states for 100 percent of COVID-19 and vaccine-related costs, an increase from the Trump administration rate of 75 percent. That’s given local officials more freedom to expand vaccination sites to the general public as criteria for who is eligible to get the shot expands.

The money, combined with the increased federal presence in the vaccine rollout, has made a difference at the local level.

New York City, for example, went from vaccinating around 9,000 people per day in December to running the country’s best-performing vaccination site at the Javits Center, which in March led the country three days in a row at 14,000 shots administered per day.

Other problems boiled down to unexpected refusals among nursing home staff and other medical workers to receive the vaccine, which complicated plans that initially expected that everyone would agree to get the shot. That came on top of pre-existing communication problems between government agencies responsible for moving the shot down to the local level.

“There was an issue with coordination between state, private and federal partners and in getting those vaccination programs running, more could have been done to get that ball rolling,” Josh Michaud, an epidemiologist at Kaiser Family Foundations, told TPM. “But the other group that was targeting for vaccinations was health care workers, and a lot of states had significant issues in vaccinating that population, without intervention on the private side.”

Early vaccination efforts were also plagued by kinks at the local level, part of which had to do with bureaucratic hiccups in registering vaccinators and which also had to do with managing the complicated logistics of taking the shots and delivering them.

“A lot of it was just working out the kinks,” Michaud added.

Another piece has to do with the phase of distribution that brings vaccine from the manufacturer’s warehouse on to the states.

This is the part of distribution — from pharmaceutical companies to the states — for which the Trump administration loudly look credit, and which began to experience serious problems in the first weeks of the rollout.

Emblematic of this was a mid-December mini-scandal over a decision by the Trump administration to cut state vaccine allocations by up to 50 percent in some cases. Though the reasons for this were complex, part of the confusion was due to a belief by the states that vaccine allocations provided by the Trump administration were final.

In fact, Trump officials said in December, states would only get final allocations the day before — adding on a huge logistical challenge to an already difficult situation.

The Biden administration has not completely solved that problem, but has significantly diminished it by agreeing to provide states with a minimum vaccine allocation three weeks before delivery.

“They’re really proactively giving states a floor three weeks out, but they’re not able to give them solid looks into upcoming weeks,” Hannan said.

She went on to say that though the pace had improved drastically, it’s a massively complex system.

“It’s much more complicated than it looks,” she added.

They needed to have someone to blame when things went wrong. So they made sure they could blame the states, especially the blue states. That had been their plan from the beginning.

John Oliver:

Just going to drop this here about the FBI’s Brett Kavanaugh investigation in which neither Christine Blasey Ford nor Kavanaugh himself were interviewed about her assault allegations:

The FBI is facing new scrutiny for its 2018 background check of Brett Kavanaugh, the supreme court justice, after a lawmaker suggested that the investigation may have been “fake”.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who serves on the judiciary committee, is calling on the newly-confirmed attorney general, Merrick Garland, to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.

[…]

Among the concerns listed in Whitehouse’s letter to Garland are allegations that some witnesses who wanted to share their accounts with the FBI could not find anyone at the bureau who would accept their testimony and that it had not assigned any individual to accept or gather evidence.

“This was unique behavior in my experience, as the Bureau is usually amenable to information and evidence; but in this matter the shutters were closed, the drawbridge drawn up, and there was no point of entry by which members of the public or Congress could provide information to the FBI,” Whitehouse said.

Not even a “round up the usual suspects” from the Trump administration’s FBI. Neither did the FBI nor the DOJ respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

More poseury (via The Trace):

Federal lobbying disclosures reveal that Palmetto State Armory, a burgeoning South Carolina firearms manufacturer with a record of using rhetoric and imagery popular in anti-government circles, retained Washington, D.C., lobbyist Craig Metz of the firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough last December. The move came only months after the company began selling products emblazoned with imagery associated with the “boogaloo” — which is slang for a war to topple the federal government, something adherents prepare for, and in some cases seek to accelerate. 

Palmetto State Armory was one of three dozen dealers of firearms, ammunition, and tactical supplies that an investigation by The Trace identified as using boogaloo-related rhetoric and imagery in their marketing and products. In February 2020, Palmetto produced and sold a limited edition AK-47-style pistol with a custom, “Big Igloo Aloha” Hawaiian-print paint job. The cheery floral pattern of the Hawaiian shirt is the unofficial uniform of pro-boogaloo accelerationists, and it frequently adorns irony-laden memes shared by supporters online. A month later, the company began offering T-shirts featuring a cartoon caricature of an armed, Hawaiian shirt-clad man guarding a pile of toilet paper rolls. The shirts are still available on its website, though the pistol is not.

Metz declined an interview request. Palmetto Armory once sold a run of AR-15 lower receivers “inscribed with ‘You Lie,’ the words shouted by U.S. Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina at President Barack Obama during a 2009 congressional address.”

Talk out of both sides of your barrels much?

(h/t JH)

The excitement Sen. Bernie Sanders generated among young voters during his runs for president flew in the face of his age. He was already in his mid-seventies and not even a Boomer. He grew a sizeable, enthusiastic following nonetheless and drew younger people into politics more than most Democratic candidates.

Now 79, Sanders joins President Joe Biden (78) and octogenarians House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (80), Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (80), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (81) as part of America’s unique gerontocracy in Eve Peyser’s essay in New York (although Sanders goes unmentioned). Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Grassley, Peyser adds, as well as Alaska’s lone representative Don Young, are 87.

Feinstein, Jane Mayer’s sources tell her, suffers from significant short-term memory loss. Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond’s was so notorious in South Carolina by his late-80s (I was told) he was said to have introduced himself to one of his sons at an event. During the Clinton impeachment, a reporter recounted Thurmond (96) mistaking him for an aide outside a hearing room and taking his arm as his escort “to the toilee.”

Peyser writes:

If you’re starting to get the feeling that the country is governed as a gerontocracy, you are correct. People over 50 make up 34 percent of the U.S. population, but 52 percent of the electorate, according to Pew. And it’s not only political power that baby-boomers and the Silent Generation have a tight grip on: Americans over 55 own two-thirds of the wealth in this country.

The money it takes to run for office is a key part of the equation. Having a network of acquaintances with sufficient funding to kick-start your campaign is not as easy for politicians in their 30s.

Young people face more barriers when it comes to running for office than old people do. “There is a finite amount of people who can credibly run for Congress,” said Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, an organization that supports people under 40 running for political office. “You need the money, the political skills, the network … When you are older, your network has more money.” Voters in national elections skew older, and the more local the election gets, the older the voter tends to be. In a municipal election, the median voter age is 57. Ross Morales Rocketto, the organization’s other co-founder, said their candidates said “the area of identity where the most folks said that they faced discrimination was age,” despite heavy representation of women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.

The problem is worse for later generations than for Boomers born into an economy that allowed them to accumulate wealth earlier in life.

Not having enough millennials and Gen-Zers, or even Gen-Xers, at the table isn’t only worrisome because it’s unfair or because of senility concerns. It threatens the very future of the nation. Because a gerontocratic government is a government that doesn’t represent all its citizens; it’s a government that doesn’t feel very democratic at all. According to a Pew survey, in 2018, the most common age for all Americans was 27, while the most common age for white Americans was an astounding 58. Overrepresentation of older folks both in Congress and the voter registries points to just how overrepresented white interests are in the U.S. Beyond age, the rules we have in place — from gerrymandering to Citizens United to the existence of the electoral college and U.S. Senate — ensure that the government does not accurately represent the increasingly racially diverse populace. (If our lawmakers were in touch with what the people actually wanted, the minimum wage would be $15/hour already.)

Older leaders such as Biden may have a wealth of legislative experience but may lack the life experience to address problems more contemporary than they are. Recall Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens (then 82) describing the internet as “a series of tubes” in 2006. Or Joe Biden urging parents to “have the record player on at night” for their kids.

Peyser adds:

This isn’t happening everywhere. Contemporary gerontocracy, it appears, is a distinctly American problem. “If you look at other countries, they’re not similarly controlled by older politicians. I think that the explanation here is the two-party system,” Munger said. “[A multiparty system gets] young people involved in politics, voting, organizing, running things, organizational politics, [which] means that they are able to start accumulating institutional power.” The two parties of the United States, on the other hand, are staunchly controlled by older generations.

Before things get better, they will get worse. “We have not yet reached the peak of boomer culture. We’re going to see the highest number of people turning 65 in U.S. history in 2023,” Munger said. “The long-run perspective is good. The long run is actually 20, 30 years. Generational replacement will happen.” In other words, things will change, but only after the baby-boomer generation literally dies.

Having the wherewithal to reach for political office requires the financial and family flexibility to do so. And as much as candidate viability is about money, there are exceptions. “The Squad,” for example. Yet some of the limited access younger people have to leadership roles is entrenched leaders not knowing when it is time to retire to make way for the young. A political party’s long-term health depends on it.

Attend Democratic Party meetings and count the few number of younger faces. Many are retired or have the flexibility others lack to pursue this “hobby.” With notable exceptions, the culture of political parties tends to reward longevity before talent. Longevity builds trust. Trust draws supporters. Support draws money. And money, the saying goes, is the mother’s milk of politics.

But longevity itself can be toxic, as I wrote before:

Young politicos jump into the game … to pursue a passion. They begin as Young Democrats and interns. They cannot wait to attend political functions and rub elbows with high-profile elected officials. They angle for selfies with the “poohbahs,” as one friend put it, and can’t wait to get the pictures up on Facebook to show family and friends just how connected they are. Perhaps they graduate to a legislative assistant position for some state representative or senator. They transition to employment with another one. Or perhaps, even to a permanent position with a committee in the legislature or Congress.

By the time they decide to run for office themselves, they have an established network of party friends, colleagues, and former employers with endorsements and fundraising lists to kick off their first campaign. Unless a party insider smoother, better looking, or better connected enters the race, they become their party’s default candidate right out of the gate. As a known quantity and trusted, they are already an establishment candidate and haven’t seen the first dollar of PAC or lobbyist money. Although this is not true of everyone, the need to maintain those professional relationships and a team-player image limits the range of policies they can entertain.

It’s not that they are not nice people with progressive leanings. It is just that, as budding political careerists looking to turn their passion for politics into a profession that pays the bills … their political judgments are colored by a desire to pursue their next professional leg up.

Political culture often resembles a fraternity.

So how to change that? How to maintain valuable institutional knowledge while growing new talent with the right skills and experience to meet the times? Abrupt change is not necessarily positive change. Donald J. Trump arrived on a wave of “throw out the bums” sentiment.

Peyser suggests:

The most obvious way to do this would be to diversify our voter ranks by passing laws that make voting more accessible to everybody, and young people in particular, who tend to move around more than older generations. (Since young people are statistically more ethnically diverse than older folks, passing laws that make voting easier for younger folks would also benefit POC communities across the board.) “If we want to change anything about who participates in democracy,” Kiesa said, “young people [need to see civic] opportunities that they find meaningful, accessible, and even visible. Democratic participation is learned. Whatever happens with early generations is going to sustain us for decades to come.”

The cultural problem and the money hurdles will remain stubborn barriers to entry.

Following up on the posts below, get a load of this from Vanity Fair:

In late December and early January, as COVID-19 vaccines were just beginning their chaotic rollout to the states, a secretive scramble took place inside the Trump White House. One after another, political appointees at very high levels approached chief of staff Mark Meadows and members of the National Security Council to ask a favor: They wanted to be on the list.

It was, to be sure, the ultimate VIP list: On it were the names of U.S. government officials whose work was considered so essential that they needed to be vaccinated against COVID-19 from a limited allotment that would otherwise have gone to the general public. The allotment was intended to protect career staff who could not telecommute (such as White House butlers), critical workers in the field (such as Secret Service agents), and those in the line of presidential succession (such as the secretary of state). The question of who was eligible in an outgoing administration, with just weeks remaining until the inauguration of a new president, was complex. To make the cut your role had to be “essential” to national functions.

The quest to get on the White House list—which was closely guarded by Meadows’s office and a small cadre of NSC officials—attracted an array of supplicants. They ranged from the representatives of cabinet secretaries to young White House desk jockeys to those prepared to leverage their connections to President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

This happened all over the administration by people who were publicly refusing to wear masks and were “downplaying” the virus.

Why, in a White House infamous for flouting pandemic precautions, would some political appointees in the executive branch show such determination in attempting to score a shot? According to the former senior administration official, the answer is simple enough: Vaccinations would enable these high-flying rule flouters to “maintain” their active lifestyles.

The previously unreported struggle over the White House list was just one front in a sprawling secret war that raged for months at the highest levels of the federal government. The question of how to equitably vaccinate a federal workforce of 2.1 million people in the midst of a presidential transition ended up pitting the National Security Council against officials from Operation Warp Speed, and career staff against political appointees. It also sparked resentment, suspicions of missing doses, and allegations of line jumping.

And it all played out against the backdrop of a critical shortage of vaccine doses across the nation. In the waning days of the Trump administration, with nearly 2,500 Americans dying of COVID-19 every day, what had been envisioned as a triumphant vaccine rollout soon devolved into Hunger Games–style chaos. As vulnerable residents struggled to score shots in fragmented state sign-up systems, governors furiously blamed federal officials at Operation Warp Speed for continually revising the number of doses they would receive.

Underlying all this was an unforgiving zero-sum math equation: In December and January, the program had roughly 70 million doses to fully vaccinate 35 million Americans with first and second shots, to be divided on a per capita basis among 64 jurisdictions, including 50 states, eight territories, and six metropolitan areas.

By definition, any dose given to anyone—whether in the states or in the State Department—would be taken from someone else, given the lack of any surplus.

No one disputed that the federal government ought to reserve a portion of vaccinations in order to protect its own essential workforce. But from there the questions got much thornier. Did employees within a White House that flouted safeguards, and was holding mask-less holiday parties, deserve a shot? What about Department of the Interior firefighters, dousing flames on federal lands? Or Border Patrol agents in pursuit of undocumented immigrants?

No WH employee who was flouting masks andattending holiday parties deserved to get a shot. I wouldn’t say that about anyone else (well, maybe Fox News hosts) but these people were destructive on a whole other level.

They started out with a legit plan to vaccinate the most essential workers. But then it became the usual Trump cock-up:

The story of how it became one reflects the larger M.O. of the Trump administration, said a federal official who worked on the pandemic response. “You had a functioning government that did its due diligence,” only to be thwarted by arbitrary and secretive decisions. “That’s what happened with every single thing in the White House.” 

[Their] relatively democratic process soon collided with the secretive decision-making culture inside Operation Warp Speed. The multibillion-dollar government program, launched last spring, was a collaboration among the Pentagon, the Department of Health and Human Services, and a number of pharmaceutical companies to dramatically accelerate the development and production of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. The four-star general Gustave F. Perna was in charge of logistics, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar oversaw his efforts. Even to some Operation Warp Speed board members, it seemed that the two men operated with little input from others. And when the CDC sent Perna a proposal to meet regularly to review decisions about the distribution of vaccinations, it was met with “crickets,” according to a CDC official. (A Pentagon spokesperson said, “There’s nothing I’m aware of that he didn’t respond to.”)

In October a new set of allocations materialized. Allotments of COVID-19 vaccines were approved for five agencies: the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Bureau of Prisons, the Indian Health Service, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which shared its doses with the Department of Homeland Security.

[…]

The operation was so opaque that even members of the Operation Warp Speed board and the White House COVID-19 task force say they were left in the dark. When several caught wind of the seemingly random vaccinations of healthy, young federal employees, they suspected that vaccine doses were being siphoned, without clear accounting, from the nation’s overall supply, Vanity Fair has learned

[…]

Nevertheless, resentment brewed as young, healthy, teleworking employees in some agencies scored vaccinations while others facing extreme perils could not. One example underscores the absurdity of the arrangement: A team of infectious disease experts from the CDC who were deploying to Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo to fight an Ebola outbreak were vaccinated against Ebola but not COVID, despite the evident hazards they faced, Vanity Fair has learned. Those employees have since been vaccinated, said a CDC spokesperson.

“The entire fiasco of the distribution falls to Perna,” said one HHS official. “We knew that [the Department of Defense] was extremely well taken care of, the intelligence community was. And then there was everybody else.”

It was a gigantic mess and they continually made it worse. Everyone was working at cross purposes and the people with juice in the WH were getting “taken care of.” Of course. Even when Trump tweeted that the vaccines would only be available to career staff (who had reason to be terrified of all the Republicans officials who refused to wear masks or take any precautions) the insiders found a way:

Still, the “specifically necessary” wording in Trump’s tweet gave those angling for vaccinations room to continue maneuvering, as the back channel clamor for them grew. It also left room for some justifiable additions. Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, who had suffered a heart attack in 2018—and who publicly played down the pandemic’s severity—got a vaccination to protect his health. Kudlow, who is 73, told Vanity Fair that he was “super grateful” to be vaccinated, adding that he regarded it “as a miracle that I didn’t get COVID” from working at the White House. “There were one or two of us who escaped it,” he added.

Yeah. A miracle.

This, of course, was the kicker. After Trump ostentatiously told the public that he didn’t need the vaccine and that he was making it available only for the front line staff we now know this:

As it turned out, Donald and Melania Trump were vaccinated at the White House in January, out of the public eye. After saying the doses should be reserved for career staff, he evidently made an exception for himself.

He and Melania both had had COVID already and theoretically should have had some immunity. And I doubt that anyone would have balked if he got it. He’s old, he was still the president. He could have done what all the other high profile officials did — get the shot in public and tell others to do so as soon as it became available.

He didn’t because he didn’t want to admit that he needed it or appear to be crossing his base.

It is an interesting bind he got himself into. He’s desperate to take credit for the vaccines but he’s the one who convinced his own voters that the virus is a hoax. And he’s terrified of losing them.

And NPR poll found this depressing number:

Among Republican men, 49% said they did not plan to get the shot, compared with just 6% of Democratic men who said the same. Among 2020 Trump supporters, 47% said they did not plan to get a vaccine compared with just 10% of Biden supporters.

Once everyone who wants to get vaccinated gets their shot, it’s tempting to say that they can just take their chances. But they can still spread it to people who can’t take the vaccine and also serve as hosts for the virus to further mutate. It’s a very bad idea.

Frank Luntz has been testing messages among Trump supporting focus groups:

Be honest that scientists don’t have all the answers. Tout the number of people who got the vaccines in trials. And don’t show pro-vaccine ads with politicians — not even ones with Donald Trump. That’s what a focus group of vaccine-hesitant Trump voters insisted to politicians and pollsters this weekend, as public health leaders rush to win over the tens of millions of Republicans who say they don’t plan to get a coronavirus shot. If those voters follow through, it would imperil efforts to achieve the high levels of immunity needed to stopthe virus’s spread in the United States, experts fear

[…]

Participants were adamant: They all believed the coronavirus threat was real, with many having contracted it themselves or aware of critically ill friends and family, and they didn’t want to be condemned as “anti-vaxxers” who opposed all vaccines. Instead, they blamed their hesitation on factors like the unknown long-term effects of new vaccines, even though scientists have stressed their confidence in the products. They also accused politicians and government scientists of repeatedly misleading them this past year — often echoing Trump’s charges that Democrats used the virus as an election-year weapon and overhyped its dangers.

Several said that recent political appeals to get the shot were only hardening their opposition. “We want to be educated, not indoctrinated,” said a man identified as Adam from New York, who praised the vaccines as a “miracle, albeit suspicious.”

[…]

Speaking of indoctrinated:

 The group panned a public service announcement released last week, for instance, featuring former presidents Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. One attendee called the ad “propaganda,” and another said the former presidents were “bad actors.”

“It actually kind of annoys me,” said a voter named Debbie from Georgia.

The group also condemned Anthony S. Fauci — the government infectious-disease specialist relentlessly attacked by Trump and conservative media for the past year — as a “liar,” “flip-flopper” and “opportunistic.”

This is good though:

https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status/1371507104876527618

Luntz says that the best messengers are people in their own communities like their doctor. But really, there is something else that’s causing the problem and it’s a big one. I don’t see how we fix this problem as long as these nihilistic assholes are pushing this propaganda:

It’s a death cult.

And as Susie Madrak at C&L points out, it’s not going to be easy to shake a lot of these people out of their delusions:

Anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories have been around for years, and in 2018, the Russians saw the potential for societal chaos and set their trolls to work. They succeeded! And there are so many people pushing misinformation from so many different directions, it’s hard to identify all the vectors.

Take former NYT reporter and Bill Maher fave Alex Berenson, who is considered an “expert” now by people who would ordinarily never credit anything from the New York Times:

Facebook makes a fortune off this trash, although today they announced they would at least label vaccine misinformation. Yay, I guess?

The journal Nature published this last month, “Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA.”

Here we show that in both countries—as of September 2020—fewer people would ‘definitely’ take a vaccine than is likely required for herd immunity, and that, relative to factual information, recent misinformation induced a decline in intent of 6.2 percentage points (95th percentile interval 3.9 to 8.5) in the UK and 6.4 percentage points (95th percentile interval 4.0 to 8.8) in the USA among those who stated that they would definitely accept a vaccine. We also find that some sociodemographic groups are differentially impacted by exposure to misinformation. Finally, we show that scientific-sounding misinformation is more strongly associated with declines in vaccination intent.

(Remember “Plandemic,” the anti-vaxxer conspiracy “documentary” presented by A Real Doctor? Millions of people saw it before Facebook grudgingly agreed to take it down.)

This kind of misinformation plays on emotions. People who spend a lot of time on social media and Facebook groups will find it injected everywhere, including non-political topics. I have a liberal friend who is constantly sending me wild conspiracy links, asking me if it’s true. I’ve tried to tell her that if these crazy stories were true, they’d be on the front page of the newspaper, not passed around on Facebook, and it calms her down for a while — until the next conspiracy.

We had better hope that someone can get to enough of these people to get us to some kind of herd immunity. But it’s not going to be easy.

By the way:

Federal health officials have identified several controversial recommendations about coronavirus testing and school reopenings released during the Trump administration that it says were “not primarily authored” by staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and don’t reflect the best scientific evidence, based on a review ordered by its new director.

The review identified three documents that had already been removed from the agency’s website: One, released in July, delivered a strong argument for school reopenings and downplayed health risks. A second set of guidelines about the country’s reopening was released in April by the White House and was far less detailed than what had been drafted by CDC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A third guidance issued in August discouraged the testing of people without covid-19 symptoms even when they had contact with infected individuals. That was replaced in September after experts inside and outside the agency raised alarms.

CDC Director RochelleWalensky ordered the review as part of her pledge to restore public trust in the beleaguered agency,which had seen its recommendations watered down or ignored during the Trump administration to align with the former president’s efforts to downplay the severity of the pandemic.

“I am focused on moving CDC forward with science, transparency and clarity leading the way,” Walensky said in a statement Monday. “It is imperative for the American people to trust CDC. If they don’t, preventable illness and injury can occur — and, tragically, lives can and will be lost. This agency and its critical health information cannot be vulnerable to undue influence, and this report helps outline our path to rebuilding confidence and ensuring the information that CDC shares with the American people is based on sound science that will keep us, our loved ones, and our communities healthy and safe.”

The review was done “to ensure that all of CDC’s existing covid-19 guidance is evidence-based and free of politics,” according to a memo from the agency’s principal deputy director, Anne Schuchat. Schuchat conducted the review, which was posted on the agency’s website Monday. Officials said they are revamping all pandemic-related guidance to ensure that science and transparency are paramount.

The July school reopening guidance was controversial because it was released weeks after Trump criticized the agency’s earlier recommendations as being “very tough and expensive.” The opening preamble extolling the importance of in-school classes was presented as a CDC document, but the agency was not part of the discussion or drafting, Walensky said. That guidance was removed in October.

This “messaging” has created a tremendous amount of pressure, with many in the media parroting the CDC’s language to spread misinformation that it was ok to re-open prematurely, avoid testing, and bash teachers and their unions. It was obviously political but they did it anyway.

The CDC and every other public health agency has got a lot of work to do to re-establish credibility. And there needs to be a hard look at how political appointees are allowed to influence such agencies during an emergency. It’s clearly another one of those “norms” we assumed would apply. But we underestimated people’s willingness to spread disinformation and actually kill people for political purposes. Now we know.

It goes without saying that rich people should pay a lot more in taxes to support a society that is decent and fair. They benefit from that more than anyone. But I also have been grateful to the wealthy for supporting some aspects of the arts that would die if they were dependent only on popular support — classical music, opera, ballet, fine art etc. I know that stuff is not as important as helping starving kids or saving the planet but it’s part of our shared civilization and worth preserving.

So where in the hell were all the wealthy, lovers of high culture when the pandemic hit? Do they only support these arts when there is a red carpet for them to show off their expensive gowns? Apparently:

As the months without a paycheck wore on, Joel Noyes, a 41-year-old cellist with the Metropolitan Opera, realized that in order to keep making his mortgage payments he would have to sell one of his most valuable possessions: his 19th-century Russian bow. He reluctantly switched back to the inferior one he had used as a child.

“It’s kind of like if you were a racecar driver and you drove Ferraris on the Formula One circuit,” Mr. Noyes said, “and suddenly you had to get on the track in a Toyota Camry.”

The Metropolitan Opera House has been dark for a year, and its musicians have gone unpaid for almost as long. The players in one of the finest orchestras in the world suddenly found themselves relying on unemployment benefits, scrambling for virtual teaching gigs, selling the tools of their trade and looking for cheaper housing. About 40 percent left the New York area. More than a tenth retired.

After the musicians had been furloughed for months, the Met offered them reduced pay in the short term if they agreed to long-term cuts that the company, which estimates that it has lost $150 million in earned revenues, says it will need to survive. When the musicians resisted, the Met offered to begin temporarily paying them up to $1,534 a week — less than half their old pay, but something — if they simply returned to the bargaining table, a proposal the musicians are weighing.

That money is a drop in the bucket for these wealthy patrons who have made massive profits on their portfolios during the pandemic. But I guess they couldn’t be bothered. It’s not about supporting the arts, it’s about providing them their opportunities to show off and be entertained. The pandemic didn’t provide any of that for them so too bad.

Oh look. Just a couple of tourists armed with bear spray having a little recreation in the nation’s capitol. No big deal:

Federal authorities have arrested and charged two men with assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick with bear spray during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but have not determined whether the exposure caused his death.

Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania and George Pierre Tanios, 39 of Morgantown, W.Va., were arrested Sunday and are expected to appear in federal court Monday.

“Give me that bear s—,” Khater allegedly said to Tanios on video recorded at the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol at 2:14 p.m., where Sicknick and other officers were standing guard behind metal bicycle racks, arrest papers say.

About nine minutes later, after Khater said he had been hit with bear spray, Khater is seen on video discharging a canister into the face of Sicknick and two other officers, arrest papers allege.

Khater and Tanios are charged with nine counts including assaulting three officers with a deadly weapon — Sicknick, another U.S. Capitol Police officer identified as C. Edwards, and a D.C. police officer identified as B. Chapman. They are also charged with civil disorder and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. The charges are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Remember. These people were attempting to trespass into the US Capitol to disrupt the certification of the presidential election. They could have stood outside and screamed “lock them up!” and waved placards. But they charged the police, fought with them, broke windows and doors and sacked the building, hunting down the legislators.

If this was supposed to just be a peaceful protest that got out of hand, why in the world were they armed with bear spray?