Good Samaritans:
There are many people vying for that title. But this guy is certainly in the running:
Tennessee state Rep. David Byrd was recorded apologizing to one of two former students who accused him of molesting them when he was a girls’ high school basketball coach in the 1980s.
“I can promise you one thing, I have been so sorry for that,” he says in a recording that surfaced along with the allegations in 2018. “I’ve lived with that and you don’t know how hard it has been for me.”
A third student charged that he had attempted to molest her. But Byrd never admitted nor explicitly denied what the three alleged, saying only, “I have done nothing wrong or inappropriate during my term as state representative.”
The then speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, Beth Harwell, called on Byrd to resign. He refused and joined many of his fellow Republican representatives in wrongdoing of another kind when the pandemic hit.
Byrd was complicit in an effort to minimize the coronavirus threat as no worse than the flu. He opposed such basic mitigation measures as masking and social distancing. He was one of 55 Tennessee Republican representatives who signed a resolution in June of last year alleging that “[the] mainstream media has sensationalized the reporting on COVID-19 in the service of political agendas.”
In November, just as Tennessee was reporting a record high number of new COVID-19 cases, Byrd and other members of the House Republican caucus ignored public health recommendations against large gatherings and held a three-day retreat. The event was in the lodge at Pickwick Landing State Park in Byrd’s district. Byrd hosted a big dinner at a nearby restaurant on the first night and of course he was among the many who did not wear a mask.
The day before Thanksgiving, Byrd tested positive for COVID-19. He was flown by helicopter from his hometown of Waynesboro to Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital in Nashville and he issued a plaintive statement on Dec. 7.
“Please pray for God’s healing for my lungs, and that He will give me strength and endurance as I battle this virus.”
He spent 55 days on a ventilator in the ICU.
“My wife and family prayed for a miracle while facing the very real prospect of planning my funeral,” he said in the statement.
He was one of the lucky ones who survived after needing to be intubated. But he was initially unable to use his limbs. And he began to suffer liver failure.
On June 12, he received a liver transplant. He was still recovering on July 29, when he arrived in a wheelchair at the House chamber.
Harwell had stepped down to make an unsuccessful run for governor. Her successor, House Speaker Cameron Sexton, said a prayer for Byrd, who had missed the entire legislative session. Byrd solemnly took a renewed oath of office.
“Life is a miraculous gift that I am humbled beyond all odds and explanation to receive a second chance at living,” he said in a statement released later by the caucus.
But Byrd made no mention of those who did die after being convinced by pandemic-denying elected officials such as himself that COVID is just like the flu. Byrd uttered not a syllable of apology for having contributed in however small a way to the deaths of hundreds of thousands by hampering our fight against the virus.
In failing to voice any concern for the effect his words and deeds as an elected official might have had on others, Byrd initially seemed just a typically monstrous minimizer who has suddenly decided that “COVID is real and it is very dangerous” after it nearly killed him.
But Byrd has now outdone himself and proven to be among the lowest of the low.
On Wednesday night, Byrd joined all 73 members of the House Republican caucus in petitioning Gov. Bill Lee to call a special session of the legislature to prohibit local mask mandates and keep businesses from barring the unvaccinated.“The General Assembly needs to evaluate the ongoing discrimination of Tennesseans by prohibiting their access to buildings due only to their vaccination status.”
At a time when virus infections were breaking records set back when he got sick, Byrd’s signature on the letter made him part of a deadly double speak.
“Governor Lee: The General Assembly of the State of Tennessee has a constitutional duty to enact general law to shape the options, decisions, and priorities of our local governments, including local boards and other local entities. We write today to request that you call an extraordinary session of the General Assembly in order for the legislature to convene and address misdirected and mandated responses to COVID-19 by local entities and officials. It is of the utmost urgency to move quickly due to the potential of significant harm to Tennesseans…”
Byrd and the other signatories were pretending to be concerned with public safety when they were actually placing everybody at risk of suffering as he had when, in his words, he felt like “every breath is an agony.” That includes youngsters in school districts that have instituted mask mandates in response to the Delta variant.
“…We believe there is a need to curtail the overreach by independent health boards and officials, confirm a parent’s right to make decisions that impact the mental and physical health of their children, provide support and direction to schools to ensure educators are properly compensated for COVID-19 leave, and protect all Tennesseans from misdirected mandates designed to limit their ability to make their own decisions…”
And the letter did not stop with masks.
“…Finally, in addition to the debate needed around continued COVID-19 mandates, the General Assembly needs to evaluate the ongoing discrimination of Tennesseans by prohibiting their access to buildings due only to their vaccination status.”
Byrd signed it even though his eight-month, nearly fatal fight with the virus had ended with him stating, “Consider the vaccine.”
The night before this letter was sent to the governor, the Franklin County School Board had met to vote on a mask mandate. The parents who spoke included Dr. Jennifer King.
“As a pediatric ICU physician, we are seeing more younger previously healthy children admitted with respiratory failure and acute respiratory distress syndrome than we have in prior strains, as cases in children are on the rise,” she told the board. “The trend will only worsen if we don’t act now.”
The board acted by voting unanimously to impose a mask mandate that allows for medical and religious exemptions. Anti-maskers followed some of the pro-mask witnesses into the parking lot and threatened them for having spoken proven and documented truth.
“We know who you are!” one anti-masker cried out. “You can leave freely, but we will find you!”
Another warned, “Actions have consequences!”
The letter sent out to the governor 24 hours later was a victory for these bare-faced thugs.
Along with the growing number of people infected by COVID, losers include the same doctors and nurses who fought so hard to save Byrd.
He had already shown disregard for them by ignoring public health measures and getting sick in the first place.
He now thanks them in his own lower-than-low way by moving to block mitigation measures when the hospitals are already overwhelmed. He failed to respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
The fellow Republican legislators who are joining in this effort continue to address him as “Coach Byrd,” as if he never had reason to apologize to anyone.
He is a monster. Truly.
Here’s a Chattanooga mother’s letter to the school board which made mask-wearing optional:
There are so many analogies.
As for vaccines, people can simply explain that when they got behind the wheel drunk and injured themselves and others that they were just “opting-out” of the drunk driving laws. Personal freedom dontcha know.
Update. The physical assaults begin:
A parent attacked a teacher following a mask dispute on the first day of school, a California superintendent said.
The incident occurred about an hour after the first day ended at Sutter Creek Elementary School in Amador County, NBC affiliate KCRA of Sacramento reported.
In a letter to families, Amador County Unified School District Superintendent Torie Gibson wrote: “As the first day of school comes and goes, there are always hiccups along the way, especially during this trying time.”
“Unfortunately, a parent took it upon himself to verbally assault a principal that led to a serious physical altercation between him and a teacher as the teacher intended to protect the principal,” she wrote in the letter.
Gibson told KCRA that the fight started when a parent who was frustrated with the school’s mask mandate saw his daughter walk out of the building with a face covering. After the parent got into an argument with the principal, a male teacher intervened, the superintendent said. The situation escalated into a physical fight, leaving the teacher “bleeding,” according to Gibson.
The teacher suffered “lacerations on his face, some bruising on his a face and a pretty good knot on the back of his head,” she told KCRA. He was treated at the hospital and later released Wednesday.
It was unclear if the parent sustained any injuries, but he was banned from being on campus, according to KCRA.
That’s not a “hiccup” it’s assault and battery and that parent should be arrested.
Jeff Sharlet tweeted this the other day and I think he’s right:
I’m for vaccination as mandatory as the law allows and for looking at means within the rule of law to expand that possibility. I’ve been reporting on the Right in books & for national magazines for 20 yrs. I understand how dangerous this position is.
The risk of legal mandatory vaccination is further rightwing violence and political disintegration. Those who want to “go slow” are praying the center will hold. From my perspective as a journalist covering the Right: It won’t. It *didn’t.* …
We don’t have to get into silly self-satisfying arguments about the Right’s ignorance or cynicism to understand that appeasement right now is a liberal pipe dream & even a form of narcissism, a refusal to look at the Right as it openly presents itself. A little while ago I drove slowly across the country visiting rightwing churches & individuals. What I found confirms a change I’ve been observing for the last 5 yrs: It’s really, truly, not issue-driven. What the Right wants, fundamentally, is a fight…
Which, of course, is a core principle of fascism, albeit in its rapidly mutating, inchoate American form: A longing for redemption through violence. So trying to finesse policy differences or even “cultural” differences (read: white supremacy self-aware or not) isn’t noble, or pragmatic; it *misses the point.* The point, of much of the Right now, is conflict for its own sake, a belief that fighting will make them whole again. Which is why I’m for making vaccination as mandatory as law will allow.
Anything short of that as an attempt to avoid a fight will, I think, actually enflame much of the Right, since they believe they need to fight to be authentic. So let’s proceed with trying to save untold numbers of Americans in the short term & trying to stop a vaccine-crushing variant from rising up & spreading globally in the only-slightly-longer term. Let’s do so fully aware of the conflict this effort will engender. How bad will the conflict be?
The good news, so far, is not as bad as the Right wants us to believe. Consider: much of the armed rightwing base believes falsely that Biden took power by coup. Are they in the streets? No–they’re telegramming, tweeting, watching TV. I’ve talked to many militant rightwingers who say “If X happens, it’ll be civil war!” Then X happens. & they move the goal.
Don’t get me wrong: this is staggeringly dangerous. But it shouldn’t be paralyzingly so. We need the strongest legal position for vaccines.
This just keeps happening. They’re just mad. Always.
Appeasement just makes them even madder.
Lol.
October 8, 2020 at 4:07 p.m. EDT168
President Trump’s promise to abruptly pull all U.S. troops from Afghanistan generated confusion Thursday, as the Pentagon indicated it had received no orders to alter plans for a conditions-based withdrawal and Afghan negotiators voiced concern that a hasty exit would intensify challenges to peace talks.
The president’s suggestion on Twitter that thousands of troops would depart within less than three months injected a new element of uncertainty into efforts by diplomats and military officials to usher nascent peace negotiations toward a potential settlement ending the nearly two-decade conflict.
“We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday evening.
Today is the big day, says Tony Norman. Donald Trump’s second swearing-in (Pittsburg Post-Gasette):
It’s Friday the 13th, 2021. Do you know where your Antichrist is?
If you’re a believer in absurd things like Christian nationalism tinged with QAnon, Aug. 13 is the day Donald John Trump is to be “reinstated to the presidency of the United States.
Before the end of the day, the twice-impeached abomination of desolation will receive the full constitutional powers accorded every president. He will then pardon his supporters and punish his enemies in the mother of all Twitter rants.
The Democrats who temporarily thwarted him by rigging the election in November will be rounded up — including the current occupant of the White House and his vice president. Their pedophile ring will be crushed by his attorney general in waiting, Matt Gaetz.
There is much more tongue-in-cheek Bible-referencin’ from Norman. “For generations, it was assumed that in the End Times, American Christians would reject the Antichrist — not root for his success.” Yet, here we are.
It might be funnier if there weren’t so many QAnon believers across the country with brains spongified enough to believe it. Or to believe Mike Lindell, the MyPillow dude headed for historical infamy if not the asylum. He’s already headed for court first, along with Sydney Powell and soon-to-be-bankrupt Rudy Giuliani. (And Giuliani calls Powell “crazy.“)
It might be funnier if a QAnon lunatic had not been charged this week with killing his 2-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter with a spear gun because he believed his wife “possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.” He murdered them because he believed they would grow into monsters.
It might be funnier if our democracy were not hanging by a thread already, even as GOP presidential aspirants in Florida and Texas practice genocide-by-Covid on their own populations, many of whom seem to welcome a Covid apocalypse.
It might be funnier if the madness was not spreading worldwide.
“I am frightened by what is coming,” said a hospital administrator in Houston. Dr. Esmaeil Porsa was only talking about the growth rate of the latest Covid wave, and about full hospitals and staff shortages.
But for Trump believers, today is the day of their savior’s return, as Tony Norman heralds:
Donald Trump will then spit on his adoring enablers, and they will respond to their spontaneous baptism with cheers.
From Fortune:
On Wednesday, Pfizer and partner BioNTech, makers of the United States’ first Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency authorized COVID vaccine, saw their share prices plummet as discouraging new research from the Mayo Clinic forced investors to question how long the Pfizer vaccine remains effective at preventing coronavirus infections and protecting those who are vaccinated from getting sick with a Delta variant case.
Pfizer’s shot may be significantly less effective than Moderna’s against breakthrough infections (42% efficacy for Pfizer/BioNTech versus 76% for Moderna), according to the data, and Pfizer stock ended the day down nearly 4% while Germany’s BioNTech slipped 13.76%. But the urgency of the investor reaction underscores the gravity of the Delta wave and uncertainty surrounding a pioneering vaccine that’s been on the U.S. market for exactly nine months.
One key issue raised by the study, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, for the millions of Americans who received two doses of Pfizer’s treatment is whether or not a Pfizer booster dose—either of the currently available jab or a new and updated version—is necessary to keep up with mutations or prevent COVID-19 reinfection from older coronavirus strains. Given that Pfizer expects to have delivered 500 million doses of its COVID vaccine under supply agreements with the U.S. government by the spring of 2022, should Americans be worried about catching a nasty case of the Delta variant or spreading the pathogen to others if they’re immunized with Pfizer’s product?
In short: There is now mounting evidence that mRNA-based vaccines such as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s lose potency over time and especially against the Delta variant, and that the Pfizer vaccine’s efficacy drop is significantly more dramatic. The Mayo Clinic study noted a wide shortfall in the mRNA vaccines’ ability to prevent infections among patients using the Mayo Clinic Health System for the month of July, when Delta variant cases made up more than 70% of new local infections in its home state of Minnesota, compared with earlier in the year. Between January and July, Moderna’s jab was 86% effective at preventing infection in this population while Pfizer’s was 76% effective. But for July alone, those numbers fell to 76% for Moderna and 42% for Pfizer, and the researchers observed similar drops for the Pfizer shot outside of Minnesota in states with high COVID counts such as Florida. (On a brighter note, both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines still proved highly effective at preventing the need for COVID infection-related hospitalization at 92% and 85% efficacy, respectively.)
The good news is, if vaccinated but infected, you probably won’t need a hospital or die. The bad news is you might not know you have it before symptoms set in, meaning you can still spread the virus hither and yon and could face the prospect of a few days if not weeks of sickness at home. Do the world a favor. Wear a mask.
New Orleans, a city that lives or dies by tourism, just began requiring a vaccination certificate or proof of a recent negative Coivid test for patrons of its bars, restaurants, music venues, etc. And tests right now are in short supply in hard-hit areas.
Sam Seder had Carol Leonnig on his show the other day and asked her, “Who was Trump’s top enabler?” She gave a few names, but in the book they reported that someone ordered COVID testing to be halted & delayed the day of Trump’s Tulsa rally. By stopping the testing that person enabled the spread of COVID in the community. I wanted to know their name.
The studies have been done and the stories have been written about the COVID deaths attributed to Trump’s actions and inactions. Yet with all that sickness and death why won’t anyone hold Trump responsible for his horrific actions?
There are many reasons, both political and technical, why Trump isn’t charged with the crimes he commited. Often it’s because he and his people hid from the public the laws they broke. When they did get charged with crimes they blocked investigations, intimidated witnesses and delayed testimonies. Also, Trump usually has someone else doing the morally repugnant and/or illegal acts for him. (See Michael Cohen)
Besides these reasons for no one going after Trump, I’ve seen a real reluctance to enforce any public health laws on anyone. But I think that if you can show that people in the Trump campaign broke specific public health laws, actively covered up their actions and then blocked investigations into the laws they broke, that is a sufficient reason to warrant an investigation.
I’ve been investigating the spread of COVID though Trump’s rallies since before the Tulsa rally. I’ve done the research, talked to the experts and based on public reporting from Leonnig, Rucker and her colleagues; it appears public health laws in Oklahoma and New Jersey were broken during Trump’s rallies. But because of privacy laws, the public can’t know exactly who broke the laws.
Sam didn’t ask my question to Leonnig, but my friend Nicole Sandler was able to ask Philip Rucker the question, “Who gave the orders to halt testing?“
The answer? We don’t know.
I think that Carol Leonnig knows, but she wasn’t asked the question. And if she does, she might not say because she is protecting her sources.
Based on my conversations and emails with the Oklahoma State Department of Health, Tulsa’s Department of Health and public health experts, it appears that this person(s) violated Oklahoma law.
Halting & delaying testing the day of the rally prevented discovery of others who may be infected. This appears to be a violation of Oklahoma state law, Title 63. Public Health and Safety statutes. Specifically, under §63-6103, The Catastrophic Health Emergency Powers Act,
Someone in the Trump campaign prevented Oklahoma state and local officials from gaining immediate access to health information of individuals. Without truthful and timely information the public health authority couldn’t carry out their lawful duty, which is to “prevent, detect, manage, and contain health threats’ ( § 63-6103. Items 3-6)
The Oklahoma State Department of Health had the authority to impose a quarantine, isolation, or halt the event. They could have made an announcement to the people in attendance to self isolate and get tested. They could have told the general public so they could avoid those who attended the event.
They didn’t do any of those things, because they didn’t have all the relevant data about infected individuals.
Oklahoma Heath statutes §63-6103, The Catastrophic Health Emergency Powers Act,
Remember, there was no vaccine in June 2020. Getting COVID could be a death sentence, in fact, it was for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Someone in the Trump campaign broke the laws on the books at the time, Rucker didn’t know who it was, but the Attorney General of Oklahoma can find out. But will he?
The people I’ve been talking to in Oklahoma have been telling me all the ways an investigation will be thwarted. For example, Gov. Stitt called up all the top hospital leaders to complain about the interviews doctors and nurses were giving to the media on the COVID-19 crisis. That’s standard bully Governor stuff, but he took it further. Stitt called Jim Gebhart, president of Mercy Hospital and told him,
..if doctors didn’t stop “fearmongering” about capacity issues it could force him [Gov. Stitt] to impose a ban on elective surgeries, which would be a financial hardship for many hospitals.
Gov. Stitt complained to hospital leaders
about interviews with media on COVID-19 crisis
December 9, 2020. Ben Felder, The Frontier
No wonder none of the doctors or nurses I’ve contacted have been willing to talk on the record about this!
Over 700 people in the medical community in Oklahoma tried to use reason to convince Tulsa’s mayor to cancel Trump’s rally. They failed.
Lawyers sued to prevent the rally from proceeding. They failed.
The venue manager had the campaign sign a contract that included safety measures like social distancing. But it was breached when someone in the campaign ordered staff to remove the social distancing stickers on chairs.
So what if I do find out who gave those orders to halt & delay testing? Someone needs to put together a request to investigate this. Because the rallies involved multiple jurisdictions and agencies, confirming this information and prosecution will require an official investigation by attorneys general, inspectors general and/or a congressional committee. Who’s going to do that? Me?
An entity with subpoena power needs to act on the information in the book. They need to investigate it to see if crimes were committed and who committed them. In this case we also need to know their intention. So often we have seen medical personnel assume that politicians would act to protect people from sickness. But that has been proven incorrect time and time again.
One of my big concerns is that in a narrow investigation lower level medical personnel will will be blamed. Yet we know from news reports that Trump and his people regularly threaten and intimidate people. We know they go after whistleblowers. What kind of political pressure from high up was put on public health officials to hold the rallies?
Could contract nurses hired for the event to do the COVID testing insist that all the individuals that should be tested were tested that day and that the results be sent to OSDH immediately?
In my opinion, the people on the campaign who gave those orders and made those decisions should be held criminally liable, at a minimum.for their violations of the Oklahoma law.
Remember the liability waivers that everyone had to sign? The campaign prepared to protect assets, not the lives of Trump’s attendees or the people in the community.
I think the Trump campaign should be held financially liable for the pain and suffering they caused the people in the Tulsa community. If it can be shown that the Trump Campaign was grossly negligent in their safety protocols, then their liability waivers are invalid. If that happens it opens up the campaign to being sued by a large number of people such as venue staff who worked the event. Perhaps the unions representing the camera crews who were assigned to cover the event could sue.
I’ve talked to a lot of really nice people doing this research. One of the people I talked to asked, “You aren’t from Tulsa, you didn’t get sick. Why do you care?” It’s a good question. We are constantly being told to write off “the Red Staters” they made their beds, now that they are deathbeds, they can lie in them.
But I don’t want to write off huge swaths of the country because a small group of people used their power to increase sickness and death.
At a press conference on August 5, 2021 Dr. Dale Bratzler, the Chief Covid Officer at the University of Oklahoma, was asked about people who were exposed to unvaccinated people without masks inside a building.
(Keep in mind that the Trump campaign knew which people were exposed to those who tested positive that day.)
Then he was asked what happens to the information if someone tests positive.
“So if you test positive the lab is required by law to send the data to the Oklahoma State Health Department. They will forward it to the county health department who has responsibility if they are going to do any contact tracing, case investigation, quarantine or isolation. “
–Dr Dale Bratzler, DO, MPH
Based on public reporting, it appears the campaign broke the law on test reporting when they actively avoided telling the state’s public health department about the infected individuals at their rally. And because there were no consequences for those people, we are seeing political power and threats overruling the doctors & policies designed to protect the health of the people in the community.
If my logical argument pointing to what the public can know isn’t enough, maybe seeing this photo of a child in a pediatric ICU will help people to understand why those with the authority to learn the full story must start an investigation. If it proves members of the Trump campaign are guilty, they should be held accountable.
This new piece by Ron Brownstein says it all:
The vaccinated, across party lines, have kind of had it with the unvaccinated, an array of new polls suggests.
While most state and national GOP leaders are focused on defending the rights of unvaccinated Americans, new polling shows that the large majority of vaccinated adults—including a substantial portion of Republicans—support tougher measures against those who have refused COVID-19 shots.
These new results, shared exclusively with The Atlantic by several pollsters, reveal that significant majorities of people who have been vaccinated support vaccine mandates for health workers, government employees, college students, and airline travelers—even, in some surveys, for all Americans or all private-sector workers. Most of the vaccinated respondents also say that entry to entertainment and sporting arenas should require proof of vaccination, and half say the same about restaurants.
All of this suggests that as the Delta variant’s “pandemic of the unvaccinated” disrupts the return to “normal” life promised by the vaccines, a backlash may be intensifying among those who have received the shots against those who have not. And that could leave Republican leaders who have unstintingly stressed the rights of the unvaccinated—including Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—in an exposed position.
As a political calculus, it’s “a risky one,” says Matthew Baum, a public-policy professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a co-founder of a multi-university study of public opinion on the outbreak. “Over time, this general sense may grow of ‘Why are we who are vaccinated enduring this in order to coddle this liberty fantasy of the unvaccinated?’ And I think that is going to get stronger as the inconvenience grows, and as the wind goes out of the getting-back-to-normal sails, which is clearly happening. Everybody I know is pissed off.”
The principal dynamic raising tension between the roughly 70 percent of American adults who have received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine and the roughly 30 percent who have not is the current caseload surge. The Delta variant has again pushed the national COVID-19 caseload past 120,000 new infections daily, more than 10 times its level in mid-June.
Under that pressure, the divide between Republican and Democratic officials over how to respond to the pandemic—which raged throughout Donald Trump’s presidency but somewhat receded as the focus shifted to vaccine distribution under President Joe Biden—has reopened. Though more Republicans in recent weeks have promoted the vaccine, the party’s leaders at both the state and national levels have consistently emphasized people’s right to refuse it, while also opposing mask mandates to combat the immediate threat in the red states where case numbers are rising fastest.
Multiple states with Republican governors have banned school districts or local governments from imposing mask mandates. (Together, those states enroll about one-fourth of all primary- and secondary-public-school students.) About 20 Republican-controlled states have barred private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. Seven Republican-controlled states have barred employers from requiring their workers to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine, and other red states are considering similar proposals.
In advancing these ideas, GOP leaders have insisted that the “choice” to reject the shot must be defended. “In Florida, your personal choice regarding vaccinations will be protected, and no business or government entity will be able to deny you services based on your decision,” DeSantis declared when signing his ban on vaccine passports in May. When New York City imposed such a requirement for admission to restaurants or other indoor venues, McCarthy sharply condemned the move as “un-American. Period.” He added: “Republicans will oppose any attempt to expand such a disastrous policy.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, as is often the case, has offered the most incendiary attacks, comparing restrictions on unvaccinated individuals to “segregation” (after earlier comparing mask requirements to the Nazi holocaust).
Democrats, more fitfully, are moving in the opposite direction, toward more mandates. Biden has made vaccination a necessity for federal workers, and a military requirement is expected close behind. Several blue states and cities have imposed vaccine mandates on government employees; California has mandated the shots for teachers and health-care workers, and many Democratic-leaning jurisdictions are requiring masks for public schools (in several cases in defiance of GOP governors’ prohibitions) and some indoor activities. Yesterday, the Los Angeles City Council moved toward adopting a version of New York’s vaccine-passport requirement. California Governor Gavin Newsom took another dramatic step yesterday by mandating that teachers either obtain a vaccine or accept weekly testing.
These moves by Biden and blue jurisdictions amount to the beginning of a shift in response to the recent upsurge, away from imposing more obligations on the vaccinated (such as mask mandates or capacity limits) and toward demanding more of the unvaccinated (through vaccine mandates or proof requirements).
Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster who has closely studied attitudes about the pandemic, says public opinion has not moved decisively in favor of more pressure on unvaccinated people. Polls do consistently find that big majorities back mask mandates in most circumstances. But regarding segments of the population for whom officials have been discussing possible vaccine mandates—health-care workers, the military, students and staff at K–12 schools and universities, and interstate travelers—surveys have produced more divergent results; most find the country split almost exactly in half. “These are not slam-dunk numbers,” for more vaccine mandates, Gourevitch told me.
But these same polls also show a widening split in attitudes between respondents who have been vaccinated and those who have not. And this suggests that the overall balance could tip further toward mandates as more Americans receive the vaccines—and as they grow more frustrated that the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is limiting their choices and multiplying their risks.
To better understand these dynamics, I asked several pollsters to break down results from their recent coronavirus surveys into four groups: Republicans and Democrats who have and have not received the shots. About 85 percent of Democrats and just over half of Republicans have been vaccinated, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which is conducting monthly polls about experiences and attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccines.
In some key respects, party still outweighed vaccination status in the polls I examined: In the Kaiser polling, for instance, vaccinated Republicans were no more likely than unvaccinated Republicans (and much less likely than Democrats, whether or not they had been vaccinated) to say that they routinely wear a mask in various public settings.
But on almost all key questions, a majority, usually a significant majority, of vaccinated Americans in these surveys wanted tougher requirements. Vaccinated Democrats remain much more likely than vaccinated Republicans to support such mandates, but a substantial portion of the latter consistently echoes those views.
Evidence of frustration among the vaccinated begins with a recent Axios/Ipsos national poll that asked who was to blame for the recent upsurge in COVID-19 cases. Compared with the Democrats who had received the vaccine, the vaccinated Republicans were much less likely to blame former President Trump or conservative media, and much more likely to point a finger at President Biden and mainstream media, according to previously unpublished figures provided to me by Axios and Ipsos.
But big majorities of the vaccinated in both parties assigned responsibility to the unvaccinated; almost two in three vaccinated Republicans joined nearly nine in 10 vaccinated Democrats in blaming them for the case rise. By contrast, less than one in 14 of the Republicans who hadn’t received the shot blamed the unvaccinated. (In this survey, like most of those I examined, the group of unvaccinated Democrats was too small to reliably analyze.)
Vaccinated Republicans also depart significantly from their unvaccinated counterparts in their assessment of the risks now facing the country. In the July Kaiser poll, about three in five vaccinated Republicans and more than four in five vaccinated Democrats expressed concern that the Delta variant “will lead to a worsening of the pandemic”; only about one in three unvaccinated Republicans agreed.
Likewise, more than eight in 10 vaccinated Republicans joined more than nine in 10 vaccinated Democrats in agreeing that “becoming infected with coronavirus” was a greater risk to their health than “getting the COVID-19 vaccine.” It may be hard to imagine how anyone might disagree, but six in 10 of the unvaccinated Republicans said that receiving the vaccine was a bigger risk than contracting the disease. (Kaiser’s poll did have enough unvaccinated Democrats to measure, and they came out in between: Only about one-third said that receiving the shot was the greatest risk, while about half picked contracting the disease.) Vaccinated Republicans consistently express much more support than unvaccinated Republicans for an aggressive response—though they remain less supportive than vaccinated Democrats.
The COVID States Project’s national polling has found the broadest support for mandates: In its latest survey, 63 percent of vaccinated Republicans, as well as 95 percent of vaccinated Democrats and 65 percent of unvaccinated Democrats, supported government action “requiring everyone” to obtain a vaccination. Unvaccinated Republicans stood isolated in their opposition; just 14 percent supported such a sweeping mandate.
When Kaiser recently asked whether “the federal government should recommend that employers” require their workers to get vaccinated, four-fifths of vaccinated Democrats and nearly half of vaccinated Republicans agreed that it should. But nearly nine in 10 unvaccinated Republicans disagreed (as did about six in 10 unvaccinated Democrats).
Quinnipiac University found similar patterns when it recently tested attitudes toward a broad range of vaccine and mask requirements. Among vaccinated Democrats, at least 85 percent backed vaccine mandates for government workers, university students, health-care workers, and all private-sector employees; well over 80 percent backed proof-of-vaccination requirements for flying or entering large arenas; and 90 percent or more backed mask requirements for public-school students and staff, as well as for participants in indoor activities in high-risk areas. (Seventy percent of vaccinated Democrats also backed proof-of-vaccination requirements for restaurants.)
In a mirror image, about 90 percent or more of unvaccinated Republicans opposed all of those ideas, with the highest percentages rejecting a private-sector vaccine mandate or proof-of-vaccination requirements for different activities. Vaccinated Republicans, though, were considerably more receptive to these ideas; somewhere between one-third and one-half supported almost all of the possible requirements. They expressed the most support for requiring vaccines for health-care workers (53 percent) and proof of vaccination to fly (44 percent), and the least support for mandating masks to enter restaurants (23 percent).
Biden so far has focused more on encouraging, rather than requiring, vaccinations. Although he’s imposed a mandate on federal employees, he’s rejected calls for requiring proof of vaccination for interstate travel, including on planes. And although he belatedly intensified his public criticism of Republican governors blocking mask mandates, he hasn’t followed those words with any policies to pressure them to change direction.
But medical experts say Biden may soon have to face a choice of imposing more mandates or accepting persistently high caseloads and hospitalization rates. Many experts originally believed that the nation probably needed to vaccinate about 70 percent of its population to achieve herd immunity. But the Delta variant is so much more contagious than the original strain that experts such as Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and Ezekiel Emanuel, the vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, say the nation now will more likely need to vaccinate 85 or 90 percent to reach that goal.
On the basis of the COVID States Project’s polling, Baum says, he believes that the share of American adults who will voluntarily take a vaccine will peak at about 75 percent, well below the new required level. Emanuel agrees. “We are in a circumstance of where we are going to need carrots and sticks,” he told me. “We are not going to get there by carrots alone.” […]
Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant, says that although the deteriorating situation will likely provoke “greater exasperation” among the vaccinated toward the unvaccinated, any push for more mandates, such as for interstate travel, would ignite a big conservative backlash. “I think it’s politically dangerous,” he told me. “It’s really hard to justify.”
Exasperation is hardly the point. These Republicans are destroying the health care system, the economy and the lives of untold numbers of people. It’s outrageous and it shouldn’t be tolerated.
But, as with so many issues in this misbegotten society, this faction of Americans are assholes and they bully the rest of us into coddling them like a bunch of toddlers having a tantrum. Over and over again,
Still, there might be some hope in this case:
But Gourevitch believes that the support for tougher measures among a significant share of vaccinated Republicans complicates the equation. He doesn’t think that the disagreement is powerful enough to cause many of those Republicans to break from their party entirely and support Biden or Democrats, but he does think that their attitudes could make it difficult for GOP leaders to generate the kind of ferocious conservative uprising against COVID-19 mandates that they have ignited on other issues over the years, such as undocumented immigration, defunding the police, and passage of the Affordable Care Act.
“The strategy that has worked for them … is when they have 90 percent agreement in their group,” Gourevitch said. “There’s something different about this than any of their culture-war or [racial]-identity fights, because a huge percentage of their own party at the very least doesn’t agree [on], or is not energized by, the position of protecting the unvaccinated.”
Biden, who has generally muted issues that might spark culture-war confrontations, has clearly been reluctant to test the public’s tolerance for more coercive measures to pressure unvaccinated individuals to receive a vaccine. But if the virus continues to find a safe harbor primarily in Republican-leaning states with low vaccination rates and lax public-health protections, he may eventually have no choice but to enter that fight.
These are the bullying loons who have turned this pandemic into a game to make themselves feel good about being a moron:
It probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the outcome, but it would have been a good thing for these people to testify in Trump’s second impeachment trial. They knew he was plotting a coup and when it didn’t work he sicced the mob on a joint session of congress:
During Donald Trump’s final weeks in office, top Justice Department officials wrangled over how the FBI should handle a particularly wacky voter fraud allegation promoted by the then-president and his allies. Unreleased emails obtained by POLITICO show just how tense the episode got.
The dispute pitted a senior career section chief against one of the DOJ’s top officials, with the FBI caught in the crossfire. Trump’s appointees at DOJ ultimately prevailed, and their investigation — a probe into a viral video from Georgia that didn’t actually find any evidence of fraud — ended up playing a role in torpedoing the president’s narrative. While Trump’s opponents fretted that the FBI’s involvementwould undermine public confidence in elections and boost Republican talking points, it had the opposite effect.
At the time of the email dispute, Trump and his allies were lobbing a host of allegations about voter fraud, claiming wide-reaching and nefarious forces had conspired to steal the election for Biden. One allegation in particular commanded the president’s attention:a video showing election workers counting ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Trump’s allies claimed it showed the workers secretly pulling ballots out of “suitcases” and using them to commit election fraud.
Officials in the office of Georgia’s secretary of state quickly debunked those claims. But on Dec. 5, Trump alluded to the video at a rally in Georgia, suggesting it proved poll workers were stuffing ballot boxes to help the Democrats.
Two days later, at 12:34 a.m. on Dec. 7, the head of DOJ’s Public Integrity Section (PIN) — which oversees investigations of voter fraud, along with a host of other issues — sent a four-paragraph email to an FBI official. Lawyers in the section had learned that FBI agents planned to interview people who appeared in a video showing votes being counted at State Farm Arena in Georgia –– a video Georgia’s secretary of state had already investigated. The email doesn’t give much detail about the video, but it appears to be discussing the same one that Trump referenced at his rally on Dec. 5.
The head of PIN — Corey Amundson, a career official with two decades of law enforcement experience — wrote that his team did not want the FBI to investigate the video.
“[Secretary of State] investigators have already conducted recorded interviews of the individuals at issue and such interviews reportedly revealed nothing to suggest nefarious activity with regard to the integrity of the election,” Amundson wrote. “The FBI ‘re-interviewing’ those individuals at this point and under the current circumstances risks great damage to the Department’s reputation, including the possible appearance of being motivated by partisan concerns.”
Before Attorney General William Barr took over, the DOJ had a long-standing approach to voter fraud probes: Agents waited to open these investigations until the elections were over, ballots were cast, and winners were certified. The policy was meant to stave off the perception that the FBI was deciding who won elections.
But the rules had changed.On Nov. 9, 2020, a few days after the networks called the election for Joe Biden,Barr issued a memo letting the FBI investigate some voter fraud allegations much more quickly. The move caused some distress in the department’s Criminal Division, as The Washington Post reported at the time.
As the FBI began executing Barr’s new policy, Amundson’s concerns quickly escalated to the highest levels of the Bureau. Shortly after 8 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 7, David Bowdich — the FBI’s second-in-command — emailed Richard Donoghue, a top DOJ official and a political appointee, about the conflict.
“This is putting us in a bad spot,” Bowdich wrote. “We need to get this PIN issue settled as to how to proceed. I feel like we are operating under an antiquated thought process here. Everyone understood that before the election we should not do these types of inquiries, but we are in a place right now in this election cycle in which these types of allegations are important to vet out, particularly when many in the country are still questioning the results.”
Donoghue replied to Bowdich a few hours later.
“It is antiquated indeed,” he wrote. He then noted that lawyers in Amundson’s section had pushed back against Barr’s November memo speeding up the FBI’s involvement in some election fraud cases. But, Donoghue continued, this wasn’t their call — it was the attorney general’s.
Barr had told Donoghue that the FBI needed to conduct some interviews about the State Farm allegations rather than relying solely on the secretary of state’s investigation, he informed Bowdich.
“It may well be that the GA SOS is correct in concluding that nothing nefarious happened there,” Donoghue continued, “but the fact is that millions of Americans have come to believe (rightly or wrongly) that something untoward took place and it is incumbent on the Department to timely conduct a limited investigation to assure the American people that we have looked at these claims.”
“If we come to the same conclusion as the GA SOS, then that should give the public increased confidence in the election results in GA,” Donoghue argued. “If we come to a different conclusion, then we’ll deal with that. Either way, the AG made it clear that he wants to be sure that we are actually doing our job and not just standing on the sidelines.”
Donoghue then repeated that this wasn’t up to Amundson.
“Moreover, given that the AG has specifically directed that the FBI conduct some interviews here (he leaves the number and depth of the interviews entirely up to the FBI), the decision has been made,” he wrote. “We all have a chain of command for a reason.”
He ended with a note of sympathy.
“Sorry that you and your team have been dragged into this again,” he concluded. “Unfortunately, this is the reality of working here these days.”
Donoghue then forwarded the email chain to Byung Jin “Bjay” Pak, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, which includes Atlanta. “JFYI,” he wrote. “Please do not forward.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform obtained these emails and planned to interview Donoghue. But then its probe of these matters was abruptly shut down.
Pak, who answered Senate investigators’ questions virtually on Wednesday, would go on to become a minor character in Trump’s futile attempt to overturn the election results. He resigned on Jan. 3, as the president pushed him to pursue the claims of voter fraud, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Barr’s decision to have the DOJ charge ahead on voter fraud investigations also proved consequential. Even before the internal debate over the Georgia video, the FBI had scrutinized other allegations and found them unpersuasive. And in an interview with the AP published December 1, 2020, Barr said he’d seen no evidence of fraud that could have changed the election’s outcome.
The FBI kept investigating fraud allegations after Barr made those comments, as these new emails show. And Georgia and Pak in particular drew significant attention from the Justice Department — and from Trump himself.
By the start of the New Year, Barr had resigned and leadership of the department had fallen to his deputy Jeffrey Rosen, who soon became entangled in the president’s efforts — efforts he successfully stiff-armed.
Emails released by the House Oversight Committee show Rosen had emailed Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark Pak’s cell phone number with the subject line “atlanta” on Jan. 1, 2021, after then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had asked Rosen to have Clark pursue voter fraud allegations in Georgia.
On Jan. 2, Rosen followed up with Clark about his call with Pak, and then later that day, Trump appeared to refer to Pak as a “never-Trumper U.S. Attorney” in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The evening after a tumultuous Jan. 3 White House meeting between top Justice Department officials and Trump, Donoghue emailed Pak with the subject line “Please call ASAP.”
Pak submitted his resignation the next morning.
Bill Barr. the coward, really covered himself in glory, didn’t he?
