Month: May 2021

Eric Boehlert’s newsletter (sign up here) today takes on this new hectoring by the media about Joe Biden continuing to wear masks when he isn’t strictly required to do so. Apparently, many of them are quite offended that anyone would do that for some reason.

Anyway:

It’s slightly jarring that in the wake of the Trump presidency, when Americans were urged to inject bleach as a way to combat Covid-19, that Biden sometimes wearing a cloth facial covering is treated as a pressing news story by the Beltway media. And the recent emphasis isn’t just on Biden. More journalists are setting their judgmental sights on those vaccinated liberals who remain cautious and continue to wear masks, dubbing them “pandemic addicts,” “irrational” and “odd.”  

The focus is absurd. I live in what’s considered to be a liberal community, and the idea that vaccinated residents here categorically refuse to part ways with their masks is preposterous. It’s simply not a thing, yet journalists seem obsessed with the idea that it’s a widespread phenomenon among stubborn progressives.

Also, wearing a mask while being fully vaccinated is a personal choice, and it’s a choice that has no effective downside, so why is the press so focused on the topic?

As one Twitter follower of mine wrote after I raised concerns about the media’s weird mask coverage, “So many of us lost love ones this past year or got really sick and they act like there is something nefarious to being cautious for a little while longer.”

Guess where this comes from?

Make no mistake, the media mask fixation comes straight from Fox News, which pressed Biden on his mask wearing practices just hours after he was sworn into office. Tucker Carlson has since declared,  “the only people who wear masks outside are zealots and neurotics.”

The ongoing mask coverage comes with an unmistakable whiff of Both Sides journalism, as journalists insist both liberals and conservatives “ignore the science” during the pandemic. But like most media Both Sides equations, this one is comically imbalanced — vaccinated liberals who keep wearing a mask cause no harm to anybody, whereas conservatives who refused to wear a mask during the pandemic helped spread a deadly virus that claimed more than 600,000 American lives.

The most aggressive example of the media finger pointing came from a recent piece in The Atlantic headlined, “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown.” Painting progressive as detached from reality in 2021, and weirdly committed to living their lives by pandemic era protocols, The Atlantic insisted, “diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity.”

And this:

Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning. 

Yet the anecdotal examples The Atlantic  linked to in that paragraph — closing beaches, banning access to playgrounds — were events that took place last year.

Meanwhile, the supposed news hook for the Biden mask fixation is the idea that by occasionally wearing one he’s causing people not to get vaccinated because he’s signaling there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, or that the vaccine doesn’t work. The evidence is overwhelming that the people who refuse to get vaccinated are made up largely of white, conservative, Trump supporters who have treated the pandemic as a partisan issue and who refused to wear masks last year.

Taking their cues from Trump who spent much of 2020 mocking people who wore masks as being “politically correct,” they lean towards thinking the virus was a hoax. The idea that those entrenched Republicans are now looking to a president they uniformly dislike for guidance on the pandemic, and that if he sometimes wears a mask it will deter them from getting vaccinated, defies logic.

It upsets people to see others wearing masks for reasons that elude me. And apparently, it isn’t confined to the Trump worshiping right or the anti-vaxxers.

I agree with Boehlert that the idea that wearing masks upsets the unvaccinated because it makes them feel like they will never, ever be free again is pretty ludicrous. The non-vaccinated are holdouts for completely different reasons, whether it’s vaccine safety, politics/religion or apathy. None of those people are not getting vaccinated because they see masks or other mitigation strategies and figure their lives will never go back to normal so why bother. They are all living their normal lives already, vaccinated or not.

I do think that the apathetic are the most likely to be persuaded to get vaccinated if you make it worth their while because they really don’t give a damn one way or the other. Put a little cash in their pockets and they’ll do it. The rest are going to make up their minds based on very different criteria than if Joe Biden wears a mask when he walks up to the microphone.

The new Young Guns speak out:

As the GOP seals the deal in excommunicating her from a leadership position, Republican legislators continue to go after Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who has been vocal in her accusations against members of her own party who she says, in pushing former President Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election, are “turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”“Freedom only survives if we protect it,” Cheney tweeted on Tuesday, the eve of her ouster. “We must speak the truth.” In response, 34-year-old conspiracy theorist and QAnon follower Rep. Lauren Bobert (R-CO) tweeted, “Liz Cheney seems to be auditioning for a job with the Lincoln Project.” Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is currently under investigation for sex trafficking, tweeted a clip of himself being interviewed by Steve Bannon and wrote, “Liz Cheney is the masthead for the Establishment in Washington, D.C.” Freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) also got in on the act, tweeting, “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney”

Such rebels. So transgressive. Ooooh.

But they are rebels with a cause: Dear Leader, the bully in chief. He is their everything.

In the eve of the Trump Party purge of heretic Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican gave a stirring speech on the House floor in which she proclaimed her unyielding fealty to the Constitution and the rule of law and declared:

Today, we face a threat America has never seen before. A former president who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol in an effort to steal the election has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him. He risks inciting further violence.

That’s putting it as starkly as I’ve ever seen it and she isn’t wrong.

It’s also important to remember that it isn’t just Cheney who faces stigmatization. Republicans all over the country are purging their members who dare to speak out against Donald Trump. They are using every lever at their disposal to usurp the democratic process in order to pave the way for a Trump restoration.

This is mostly happening in red and purple states where they either dominate or at least share political power and they’re ruthlessly using it to manipulate the vote and the voting systems to tilt in their favor. But it should be noted that they are also trying to create chaos in blue states wherever they can as well. The shenanigans the Trump administration pulled with COVID supplies and testing in order to help Trump’s re-election effort are one example, but the most notable attempt post-election has come from GOP operatives trying to recall California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.

Everyone remembers that back in 2003, the Republicans succeeded in recalling Governor Gray Davis ostensibly over a hike in car registration fees (which were mandated by law.) Davis was remarkably unpopular, with a 24% approval rating just before the recall was approved. And everyone knew that a mega-movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was very likely to enter the race which made the whole thing into an entertainment spectacle that a guy whose name was Gray (and had a personality to match) just wasn’t going to be able to survive.

Republican gadflies have been circulating petitions to recall Newsom practically since the moment he was inaugurated and they did the same with Jerry Brown, his predecessor who was also a Democrat. Considering the sad, moribund state of the California GOP, creating chaos is about all they are capable of. This time, with the state reeling from the pandemic, they were able to get enough signatures to qualify for the recall which may take place next fall, just one year from the regular election, which makes it even more absurd.

The petition first got traction when it was reported that Newsom had gone to dinner with health care lobbyists at a very fancy restaurant during COVID. There was some question as to whether his attendance actually circumvented the lockdown rules that were in place at the time but Newsom did apologize for failing to model good public health behavior and acknowledged that it was a mistake, which it was. The petitioners further accused him of exempting a wine property he owns with his family from the rules last summer but on closer examination, it’s clear that the rules in place at the time were according to the public health guidelines and his property was one among many in the Napa Valley that was not fully closed until the big winter spike that shut down everything in the state.

As you can see, these are Republican claims of liberal “hypocrisy” which, considering their worship of Donald Trump who was holding super-spreader rallies throughout the COVID pandemic, is fatuous nonsense but they form the basis of the recall complaints. Californians are like everyone else in the country, sick of COVID restrictions and desperate to get back to normal so it figures that more than a few people probably signed the petitions just to register their frustration.

At one point Newsom’s approval rating had dipped below 50% (a long way from the 24% Gray Davis had at the same point in the process) but it’s ticked up to 54% in the latest polls as the vaccination process has been successful and the state is looking to completely open up next month. That poll also showed that the Big Name Star the Republicans are offering up this time, Caitlyn Jenner, isn’t drawing any support despite hiring such GOP luminaries as former Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale.

That is not to say that Newsom doesn’t have a full plate and plenty of challenges that the voters are anxious to see confronted as the crisis wanes. Much like other states, California is facing a desperate homeless crisis in the cities, a sharp rise in crime during the pandemic year, and perhaps most importantly, a terrible housing crisis that is threatening the well-being of the state.

On the other hand, Newsom has some very effective tools in his toolbox to try to go about dealing with all that.

California has a great big 75.7 billion dollar surplus. You see, unlike most states, California taxes capital gains the same as money made from wages and salaries. Surprisingly, the state’s super-wealthy people have decided to stay in the state despite being forced to share a portion of their vast wealth. Imagine that. After all, it’s not as if they can’t spare it. So Newsom announced this week that he plans to rebate 8 billion dollars to lower and middle-income Californians in the form of $600 checks which will no doubt be very welcome to the vast majority who didn’t do quite as well as the super-rich during the pandemic. (One of the most amusing ironies about that is this rebate is actually required by law as part of the Republican tax revolt of the 1970s that nearly bankrupted the state in earlier days.) He will also pay 100 percent of the back rent owed by some low-income renters and will spend $2 billion to help people pay overdue utility bills. He’s committed more billions on expanded child care subsidies and drought and wildfire mitigation and he’s asking the legislature to approve $12 billion over and above what has been budgeted for homelessness over the next two years. And that’s just for starters.

Perhaps the Republicans will be able to find enough angry voters in the state to oppose taxing the super-rich and complain about all that help for ordinary working families and people in need but I doubt it. California is the beating heart of blue America and this time the Terminator isn’t going to be on the ballot, the state isn’t in a perpetual state of crisis over funding and the California Republican Party is a joke. If Newsom survives they’ll shriek that the vote was rigged but that’s really all they’ve got. 

Salon

Or something:

Since his deplatforming from nearly all of social media, Trump has relied on sending statements from his Save America PAC or his Office of the 45th President desk. Much of these statements lack anything new or newsy and are often ignored. But in this instance, the analogy was so weird and at a new level of desperation that it seemed fitting.

Trump opens by baselessly calling out a “major” fraud case in the Michigan Election (which has long been certified) before comparing the 2020 Election results to a jewelry heist. Really.

“If a thief robs a jewelry store of all of its diamonds (the 2020 Presidential Election), the diamonds must be returned,” Trump states, which seems a fairly clear suggestion that he believes that he should return to the White House? Or is he just continuing to talk trash, which is his wont? Read the full statement below:

The major Michigan Election Fraud case has just filed a bombshell pleading claiming votes were intentionally switched from President Trump to Joe Biden. The number of votes is MASSIVE and determinative. This will prove true in numerous other States. All Republicans must UNIFY and not let this happen. If a thief robs a jewelry store of all of its diamonds (the 2020 Presidential Election), the diamonds must be returned. The Fake News media refuses to cover the greatest Election Fraud in the history of our Country. They have lost all credibility, but ultimately, they will have no choice!

Trump’s latest (and weirdest?) millupling down on the specious claims of election fraud comes as Rep. Liz Cheney appears to be losing her leadership role among House Republicans because she has had the temerity to call out Trump’s pure bullshittery on election fraud.

[…]

And that’s where the GOP finds itself. With a leader who lost an election but is falsely claiming the White House should be returned to him like stolen diamonds, and a conservative Congresswoman who has become a pariah for calling out the flat weirdness and lies of the party leader.

It’s hard to know if he actually believes these inane “audits” and looney lawsuits will return him immediately to the White House or if he’s just grifting for the moment and preparing “The Big Steal” for 2024. Either way, he and his entire cult are fucking bonkers.

In their ongoing effort to divert public attention from their complicity in the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection, Republicans are trying to convince voters they are a “working-class party.” No, really.

Greg Sargent observes that this narrative emphasis comes as Republicans complain that unemployment benefits they opposed are too generous. Moral hazard rises from the grave:

These benefits, they say, are discouraging Americans from getting back to their jobs. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) claims they placed “handcuffs” on the recovery, and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) insists that they’re “making unemployment pay more than work.”

That lyric is familiar. Maybe if they hummed a few bars?

Paul Krugman concludes the Republicans’ populist rebranding effort is a farce. When they complain about cancel culture they don’t mean the Chamber of Commerce effort in Republican-controlled states to cancel the $300-a-month supplement provided under the American Rescue Plan.

As for benefits depressing job growth among low-wage workers, Krugman states, “The actual pattern was the reverse: big job gains in low-wage sectors like leisure and hospitality, job losses in high-wage sectors like professional services.”

Lack of child care remains a factor in some people not returning to work, as does covid-skittishness, as does how the pandemic has forced some people “to reassess their life prospects, a good thing,” Sargent writes:

The truth or falsity of the GOP story aside, the very fact that Republicans are telling it exposes the “working-class party” ruse. As Jordan Weissmann notes, even if benefits did discourage work, instead of slashing them we might consider letting people temporarily keep them while returning, since this dynamic would be illustrating how unremunerative their jobs are.

This is the point that doesn’t appear to concern Republicans. To them, if low-wage work is so unrewarding that paltry unemployment benefits discourage it, the problem is the latter and not the former.

The new “working-class” GOP is making the same arguments for cutting off unemployment benefits that it made during the recovery from the Great Recession. As Krugman concludes, “punishing the unemployed is what Republicans do, whenever they can.”

Laura Clawson provides a case-in-point from Mississippi. Gov. Tate Reeves will refuse to expand federal unemployment benefits, “costing unemployed Mississippians $300 a week in an effort to force them into low-wage jobs.” This, too, is what Republicans do, whenever they can.

Clawson writes:

Mississippi Republicans are trying to force people back into low-wage jobs in the state with the lowest vaccination rate in the country—just 41.5% of adults have had one vaccine dose. But they’re part of a broader effort to normalize low wages in any working environment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently called for an end to the unemployment benefits supplement. Many restaurant owners have been on an extended whine campaign—with help from the media—about how they can’t get people to work the exact schedules they want on the low wages they want to pay to deal with often unmasked, belligerent customers.

Other factors like lower numbers of seasonal immigrants or the sudden rush of restaurants trying to staff back up, creating more competition for workers, are less often mentioned.

When reporters focus on what bosses say (which is very much the same as what Republican politicians say), they get a lot of, “When people can make more staying at home than going to work, they will stay at home,” as one McDonald’s franchisee group recently wrote in a letter to its members. But when they talk to workers, they hear, “You couldn’t pay me $20 an hour to work in food for the conditions we had to endure there,” as a former Chipotle worker told Business Insider. Or, “Everybody is honestly so tired of being so mistreated, still,” in the words of a Starbucks worker.

[…]

”We are so sick and tired of [restaurant owners] assuming we want a handout,” another Washington, D.C. area restaurant worker told Eater. “We want to work, but we also want to be treated like human beings. We haven’t been for way too long.”

https://twitter.com/DevitaDavison/status/1391415254710632448?s=20

But you know, Republicans being the “working-class party” means “harder work for everyone. And more of it, too!” For less money and poorer working conditions.

Patriotic chest-thumping has always been a turn-off. Pride of accomplishment is one thing. It is another to believe that because it gave rise to you yours is the greatest country in the world. Especially when you have visited no others.

But honestly, couldn’t we stand a little pride about now instead of shame?

Samantha Power thinks the country’s standing in the world was built on its perceived “willingness to undertake challenging endeavors and its ability to accomplish difficult tasks.” Writing in Foreign Affairs ahead of the change of administrations, the former U.N. ambassador wrote that the Biden administration’s foreign policy should “highlight the return of American expertise and competence.”

“The United States can reenter all the deals and international organizations it wants,” Power wrote, “but the biggest gains in influence will come by demonstrating its ability to deliver in many countries’ hour of greatest need.”

Now Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, Power believes a display of U.S. competence here and abroad — policies that deliver tangible results — can help restore the country’s standing after four years led by an arrogant, aberrant administration. An effective international response to the coronavirus pandemic by the Biden administration could do just that. And along the way, “beat China at the biggest soft-power contest in generations, regain its reputation as the world’s ‘indispensable’ nation and, not incidentally in Power’s view, do good,” Karen DeYoung writes in The Washington Post:

Critics, both within and outside the administration, charge that Biden still has no overall strategy to address the pandemic, with piecemeal initiatives and authorities spread across departments. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled a hearing Wednesday on the administration’s international coronavirus response, with testimony from Gayle E. Smith, the Biden administration’s State Department-based coordinator on the issue, and Jeremy Konyndyk, director of USAID’s coronavirus task force.

Power sees a major part of her job as convincing Americans that helping others helps the United States. “As covid illustrates better than any contemporary threat,” she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during her March confirmation hearing, “the fate of the American people” is connected to progress in the rest of the world. “Health infrastructure, economic prosperity, the curbing of extremism and radicalization . . . development and diplomacy have to be resourced and priorities alongside our essential defense efforts.”

Alongside that, we have to clean up our own act at home if we expect to regain our international standing. A video from the New York Times shows half a dozen active and retired police officers from multiple countries reacting to videos showing how policing is done in the U.S. “That’s a murder,” one says of the George Floyd video. The others are aghast. “I’m speechless,” says a cop from Northern Ireland. Confronted with the policy of “qualified immunity” for U.S. cops, the foreigners are stunned and confused. Also by the “warrior cop” mindset taught in U.S. police academies. If we are setting an example, it is a bad one.

Meanwhile, the republic teeters on the brink of collapse. Or at least the Republican half does, and threatens to take the rest of us with it.

House Republicans today are expected to strip Rep. Liz Cheney of her leadership position in the caucus for not adopting Donald Trump’s stolen-election catechism. For her part, Cheney refuses to bend the knee to Trump. Former vice president Mike Pence was thought spineless during his tenure, but he did his duty in certifying the election on January 6, even after Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy proved himself not only more spineless than Pence, but feckless as well.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, warned McCarthy in a conference call that their claims the election was stolen would lead to violence. McCarthy blew off the warning and the rest will be in the history books.

Dana Milbank wrote in the Post:

Kinzinger tweeted about the exchange Monday and expanded on it during a National Press Club virtual gathering. “This was entirely predictable,” the sixth-term lawmaker said of the deadly attack, “and it was disregarded.”

Kinzinger brought all this up, he said, because McCarthy is seeking to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) as the No. 3 House Republican over her refusal to embrace the “big lie” that then-President Donald Trump won the election — the very lie that provoked the Capitol attack. “Liz is being chased out for one thing,” Kinzinger said. “… Her consistency. She said the same exact thing that Kevin McCarthy said on January 6th, which is Donald Trump is responsible” for the insurrection.

The corruption on display is as disheartening as any of our foreign military scandals from Mỹ Lai to Abu Ghraib, or domestic scandals from police killings to the treatment of refugees on the southern border. The United States could stand a bit of good press. Our psyches could stand it. The world could.

“For all the lofty pronouncements we can make about America’s global leadership,” Powell says, “it is our country’s actions, our ambition, our ability to get big things done that truly moves minds and changes futures.” A recommitment to those goals and a demonstration of them in action is overdue. Plus a repudiation of those who have demonstrated not just bad faith but lack of faith in what the world needs us to be again.

WATCH: Complete remarks from Rep. Liz Cheney.

"We must speak the truth. Our election was not stolen and America has not failed." pic.twitter.com/pewuBnMoQh

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 12, 2021

This comment on Nicolle Wallace’s show by journalist Tim Alberta, who covers the right, sends a little shudder down your spine:

Last fall before the election I traveled around the country reporting a pretty big piece about where this was taking us post election day. And for all the noise and the fury coming out of the Trump campaign, it was apparent then and it’s really apparent now that all of the really alarming activity is happening on the ground in these states.

It’s easy to forget now but we had a period of time late last year where we had multiple state parties calling for succession from the union, calling for martyrdom in the name of president Trump. People were openly saying “I’d be willing to die for President Trump, are you willing to die?”

This is really alarming stuff that was happening and that’s not even getting into all of this smaller, somewhat more conventional, battles around ballot access and everything else. And that has obviously only intensified now with Trump out of office with so many Republicans at the local and state level feeling like the defining litmus test of this era is whether or not they are willing to continue fighting on this idea that the election was stolen and that future elections will be stolen if they do not take sweeping action in the name of preventing this mystical election fraud that they were told happened in 2020.

And that is such an animating thing down to the grassroots level. I can just tell you that county Republican parties, local Republican parties, activist groups, this is all they’re talking about now. The old battles around health care and spending and even immigration to some extent, they’re virtually non-existent now or at least they pale in comparison to the amount of time and energy and money being funneled into these fights around voting.

I wrote about his the other day for Salon, noting that some of the DC Republicans are anxiously awaiting the re-emergence of the Tea Party to bolster their resistance to the Biden agenda. But they aren’t showing up and this is the reason. The right wing in this country doesn’t care about government spending or “deficits.” They care about their culture war and they care about beating Democrats. Their racist, white nationalist, xenophobic, sexist, patriarchal, throwback, autocratic worldview is all wrapped up in that.

Donald Trump tuned right into that zeitgeist and rode it to power mainly because he understood it better than the over educated GOP politicians whose agenda was about money, influence and power. They are all just as corrupt s Trump in their own way. And they are proving it with their willingness to jump on that zeitgeist too, knowing very well that it’s a dangerous slide into a chaotic autocracy run by the likes of Donald Trump, Steven Miller and Mike Pompeo. (Just imagine if they win back power in 2024 — they learned a lot the last time.)

A thought for the day:

When they jettison Liz Cheney on Wednesday, the Republican Party will send a message to whatever sane conservatives remain inside its circus tent: You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

There’s a routine where Trumpists, most recently Matt Gaetz, go on about how, “They aren’t really coming for me. They’re coming for you. I’m just in the way.” That’s not true (they’re after Gaetz, for instance, for allegedly paying for sex with teenagers) but it is another classic case of victimhood and projection.

No matter what nonsense House Minority Leader and craven Trump toady Kevin McCarthy says about how “we are a big tent party” that “embrace(s) free thought and debate,” ousting Cheney from her role in Republican leadership isn’t just about Cheney. It’s about rooting out millions of center-right Americans who just aren’t crazy enough to be members of today’s Republican Party,

That’s from Matt Lewis at the Daily Beast who is carving out a place for himself as shrill Trump and Biden critic. Nonetheless, he’s making a good point: by purging Liz Cheney for believing that the election was not stolen, they are likely purging a whole bunch of Republican voters who believe the same thing.

Check it out:

That means the party is purging itself of a quarter of its voters.

This is a party that achieved a legitimate majority only once in the last 8 presidential elections. It can only maintain a majority in the congress through crude gerrymandering and the undemocratic Senate. And that was before it started purging its members for failing to blindly follow that orange-faced imbecile Donald Trump. No wonder they are frantically trying to rig elections all over the country. If they rely on democracy they are screwed.

And consider this as well:

On December 17, 2020, Gallup polling found that 31% of Americans identified as Democrats, 25% identified as Republican, and 41% as Independent.

Think of all the people who split their tickets in 2020 because they disliked Trump but still saw themselves as Republicans. Is the GOP still their party?

A local story from Ohio points out that all the people in the hospital with COVID are unvaccinated. Of course they are.

Vaccine effectiveness is showing up in real-world numbers as local hospitals calculate how many COVID-19 patients have been vaccinated.

“When you look at our hospitals right now, there are about 150 people with COVID in those hospitals. None of them have had the vaccine,” said Hamilton County health commissioner Greg Kesterman.

The exact breakdown of numbers shows in Southwest Ohio there are 142 hospitalized with COVID-19, 36 are in the ICU, 28 are on ventilators. Zero have been vaccinated.

At St. Elizabeth in Northern Kentucky, there are 28 COVID patients, 7 are in the ICU. Zero have been vaccinated.

“This is what we expected to see. This is what the data showed. This is why the science is leading us in this direction,” said UC College of Medicine Dr. Carl Fichtenbaum. “It should be a wakeup call to people who said, ‘I’m not sure about this vaccine.’”

Fichtenbaum led the Moderna studies at the UC College of Medicine.

Proof of performance is showing up in another vaccine statistic locally.

“We knew that our older population is most vulnerable to COVID, and yet right now, those 80 plus have the lowest rate of hospitalization,” said Health Collaborative vaccine specialist Kate Schroder. “It’s next to nothing because we have really high rates of vaccination among the older population.”

Vaccines are available everywhere. They work. To the extent that there are people who are having trouble getting to the vaccine sites, there should be much more outreach. We should keep trying to persuade people to get the shot. But it’s not going to be too long before we have to say that people who get COVID brought it on themselves.

The good news is that the vaccines are effective against all the variants that have been thrown at them. We don’t know if that will hold, but so far so good.