Month: December 2021

Philip Bump of the Washington post explains and one can only wish the rest of the media would listen. Judging by the coverage today, they haven’t heard it yet:

The economic news that came first thing Friday morning was not what President Biden had hoped: the country added only 210,000 jobs in November, well below expectations and below the pace needed to replace the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic. But in 2021, the anodyne qualifier that the numbers are subject to revision is more important than ever. The odds are good that the November total is being underreported — as happened nearly every other month this year.

It happened in the November jobs report, too. Yes, the top-line number of 210,000 jobs wasn’t what economists or Democrats hoped to see. But there were also upward revisions to the September and October jobs numbers, by 67,000 jobs in the former and 15,000 in the latter.

The change to the September number is the second revision. The first increased the initial estimate by 118,000. In other words, the September jobs total was increased by 185,000 since it was initially reported as 194,000 — an initial report that was described as “disappointing.” Since that disappointing report, the estimated number of jobs added in the month has nearly doubled.

That’s happened repeatedly this year. Since 1979, the furthest back that Bureau of Labor Statistics data on revisions goes, the country has never added as many jobs in a year or seen such a large upward revision. The arrows below show the revision from the initial estimate (indicated with a line). Revisions are usually modest. Not this year.

[…]

It is important to remember that this is in part a function of the weirdness of the economy and the scale of the rebound in employment. You probably noticed that the other outliers on the graph of cumulative revisions were 2008 and 2020, years in which employment shifted dramatically because of economic shocks. Biden has benefited from the economy rapidly adding jobs as it recovers from the worst effects of the pandemic; that has both amplified the number of jobs “created” this year and undoubtedly contributed to the need to revise prior estimates. Because so many jobs have been added, the revisions are actually a relatively small percentage of the total. In past years, the revisions have been larger when measured relative to the total jobs numbers.

But this weirdness also serves as a cautionary note for the jobs report released on Friday. In 2021, at least, the initial number of jobs reported might be treated the way Mark Twain treated the weather in New England. If you’re not happy about it, wait a little bit.

Of course, that would require the press to report the revisions with the same intensity that they spread the alleged bad news when it first comes out. I’ve seen no evidence that they have ever done that.

The narrative is that Biden’s economy is is the ditch and at this point no amount of good news is going to derail it. Sadly, I suspect the only thing that would change it would be a big Democratic win in 2022 and this coverage makes that all the more unlikely.

I wonder why he’s doing this now?

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control.

DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines.But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be “not encumbered by the federal government.”

He said this force would give him “the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible.” DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them.

Other states have state militias, it’s not unprecedented. But DeSantis doing this in the midst of the greatest polarization in our country since the 1850s certainly sends a message to the Trump base. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

The arguments and questioning in this week’s oral argument before the Supreme Court in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health pretty decisively telegraphed that abortion rights in the United States really are on the chopping block. From the looks of it, the best case scenario will be a free-for-all among the states as to how little time they can give women to decide to have an abortion, and the worst case will be the full overturning of Roe vs Wade. If it is the latter, 17 states that already have laws on the books making abortion totally illegal and will be able to immediately enforce them. All other states run by Republicans will almost certainly follow.

The six conservative justices, three of whom were installed through the Machiavellian manipulations of the self-described Grim Reaper, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, didn’t even attempt to hide the fact that their solemn insistence during their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe to be settled law was the joke we all knew it to be when they said it. They were downright smug about their deception.

The two newest justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, seemed especially pleased with themselves, with Kavanaugh fatuously claiming that overturning a constitutional right that’s been in effect for half a century was actually an act of neutrality by the court. Barrett, meanwhile, piously insisted that women forced to endure pregnancy will lose little since they can easily give their children up for adoption these days. I’m sure it was all they could do to refrain from high-fiving each other on the bench. This dark day has been a long time coming.

There had been quite a bit of talk prior to the oral arguments that Chief Justice John Roberts was terribly concerned about the Court’s legitimacy and that recent speeches by Justices Samuel Alito, Barrett and Stephen Breyer indicated some concern about their reputation and possible threats to the institution. Please. The conservatives on the court could not care less about their legitimacy, at least as defined by the general public, and we have known this since at least 2000 when they boldly intervened in the contested presidential election. At the time, the conservatives on the court (two of whom were appointed by the father of the GOP candidate) ruled on a partisan basis to hand George W. Bush the election. They are dancing with those who gave them their lifetime appointments and they have done so for at least the last 20 years.

But just in case any of them might lose their nerve, conservative activists are making it clear that the justices better stiffen their spines.

Last week, the Washington Post published an op-ed by former Attorney General Ed Meese in which he told the six conservative justices that the success or failure of the conservative legal movement of the past four decades rests on the Supreme Court conservatives’ willingness to overturn this precedent:

Roe has stood for years as the prime example of disrespect to our Constitution’s allocation of power and the proper judicial role. It has been the focus of criticism from judges and legal scholars including Robert H. Bork, Alexander Bickel, William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia. And for good reason. To them and the legal movement they inspired, Roe‘s judicial supremacy misconceived the Constitution, ignored the lessons of history and encouraged unaccountable government…

There is a separate “law of abortion,” as Roe‘s author, Justice Harry A. Blackmun, put it, that distorts or ignores ordinary legal rules so to preserve constitutionalized abortion. With that, many other areas of law — from free speech, religious liberty, voting laws, to mundane matters of civil procedure — have been turned into proxy wars over abortion, because Roe and Casey prevent the court from honestly confronting their lacking basis in the Constitution. In short, constitutionalized abortion epitomizes judicial supremacy because it rests on nothing else.

The fact that it saved the lives and futures of millions of people is simply irrelevant. It always has been.

Meese admits in his piece that the greatest disappointment of Ronald Reagan’s presidency was the right’s inability to overturn Roe v. Wade. But it was 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey that really galvanized the conservative legal movement and precipitated the strategy to pack the Supreme Court with right-wing radicals. Conservatives had thought they had it made with eight justices appointed by Republican presidents and one appointed by a Democrat who had dissented in Roe v. Wade. Instead, the court majority found a way to uphold the precedent and conservatives have never gotten over the betrayal.

So even after the very promising oral arguments this week, the right is keeping the pressure on — and in the process revealing just how blatantly political this all really is:

Ingraham is really mad at the possibility that the Supreme Court won’t rule a certain way after “all the money that has been raised” pic.twitter.com/jaHo1uIdfX

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 2, 2021

Those comments are actually hilariously hypocritical in light of their shrieking opposition to expanding the court or instituting term limits. But they are nothing if not shameless.

Abortion has long been a political bonanza for conservative politics and they are not going to want to give it up. If Roe is overturned there will immediately be a push to ban abortion nationally through some sort of “fetal personhood” doctrine and there will be attempts to cripple scientific advances by banning stem cell research, eliminating access to abortion medications and certain forms of birth control. Any states that might have exceptions for rape and incest will be challenged, restrictions on travel and laws against crossing state lines to obtain an abortion will be enacted. And at some point, they will have to consider punishment for women who obtain illegal abortions because that’s where this inevitably leads. (Even Donald Trump instinctively understood that before they instructed him how to lie about it for general consumption.) The right has been organized around this issue for 40 years. If Roe is overturned, they will have to keep upping the ante to keep those grassroots activists engaged.

And if they can overturn a constitutional right that’s been in place for 50 years, don’t kid yourself; they’re coming for marriage equality next. Ed Meese signaled that intention in his op-ed:

Dissenting in the same-sex marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., presciently warned about the consequences of imagining that the Constitution contains a right simply because some consider it desirable.

“A lesson that some will take from today’s decision is that preaching about the proper method of interpreting the Constitution or the virtues of judicial self-restraint and humility cannot compete with the temptation to achieve what is viewed as a noble end by any practicable means,” he wrote, joined by Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

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The idea that this group of hardcore judicial activists who are, as we speak, considering overturning gun safety laws throughout the country based upon a constitutional right to bear arms that was only decided in 2008, portray themselves to be neutral arbiters and practitioners of judicial self-restraint is insane. But here we are. The judicial revolution these people are preparing to wage is going to turn this country inside out.  

Salon

Yeah. That guy:

St, Petersburg, Florida (CNN) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control.

DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines.

But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be “not encumbered by the federal government.” He said this force would give him “the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible.” DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them.

The move by DeSantis comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s directive warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied.

No Governor should have his own handpicked secret police. https://t.co/BWEPhM5rHa

— Charlie Crist (@CharlieCrist) December 2, 2021

But, it’s what DeSantis wants for Christmas.

Chris Hayes was raised Catholic (as I was) and has always been ambivalent about the motives behind the “pro-life” movement. Were people in it sincere in their opposition to abortion? His relations seemed to be. Their positions seemed consistent. They opposed abortion, but they also opposed war and the death penalty, etc. But there was also the broader movement and its leaders whose intentions seemed more cynical.

Last night on his MSNBC show, Hayes publicly admitted that recent events have confirmed for him that the movement’s professed motivations are just “kind of brilliant” branding. Who can be against life?

Now, over the past year we’ve essentially run an experiment that tests these two theories. Is the anti-abortion movement born out of a cynical desire to control women and enforce patriarchy, traditional gender roles? Or is it sincerely held belief in the sanctity, the holiness, of this precious thing we called human life? And after nearly 800,000 Covid deaths, I got to say I think we have a pretty good answer. Since the very beginning of the pandemic last March, we have watched the spectacle of the conservative, anti-abortion movement praising life of the unborn and in the same breath essentially shrugging their shoulders about death from the virus.

Hayes cited several cases of conservative leaders dismissing the deaths of their citizens, Republican state governments withholding information that might have saved people’s lives, and quashing affirmative actions taken elsewhere that might have prevented their deaths. But, oh, the life of the unborn is precious.

What about the sanctity of the lives of the thousands dying daily, preventable deaths by Covid? Hayes cites Republican Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, home to the 15-week abortion ban case heard on Wednesday before the Supreme Court. Commenting on why Mississippians dying of Covid seem less frightened by it, Reeves said, “When you believe in eternal lie – when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things.”

So you don’t think life is that important, Hayes translates. So after arguing in court this week “self-righteously, sanctimoniously” about the sanctity of life, Hayes said, getting worked up, “The many preventable deaths in that state are just a sped-up reunion with the Heavenly Father.”

A pair of RNC tweets posted hours apart, spell out the rank hypocrisy with digital permanence:

Life is precious. Republicans will always stand for the sanctity of life.

— GOP (@GOP) December 1, 2021

NO Biden vaccine mandate!

— GOP (@GOP) December 1, 2021

The political movement that trumpets its support for the sanctity of life, Hayes finished, has reacted to “the most devastating mass-casualty event of our lifetimes” with “a collective WHATEVER.” When it is not actively enabling the virus in killing people, primarily, its own people. “They chose death instead.”

Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large for New York magazine, thinks Hayes is a bit late to the show. She saw long ago that the party of “fetishistic moralizing” about fetal life is also the one steadfastly against welfare and snap programs, against affordable housing and paid parental leave, against subsidized child care, etc., etc. Against programs that support stable, thriving families for the most vulnerable Americans. Her experiment testing their sincerity ended for her long ago.

Nonetheless, it was bracing to watch Hayes publicly confront the fact that, yes, abortion foes are not interested in life, either in the abstract, in the real world, or in the womb. Their real motivation is in controlling women. But that patriarchal impulse is so deeply embedded that not even conservative women in the movement perceive the cultural programming with which they were raised.

The conservative movement is about maintaining power. It is about backlash. The anti-abortion movement is interwoven with a quilt of attitudes, cultural mores, and policy positions on the right intended to keep the disadvantaged disadvantaged, to prevent any erosion of traditional power structures that keep white men in charge, women subservient, and everyone outside their club too busy feeding themselves and disempowered to challenge the status quo.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote this week:

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln deplored the state laws discriminating against Black Americans, as well as immigrants in the North and West. He challenged Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who said that discriminatory state laws—including laws that protected human enslavement—were just fine so long as those few men allowed to vote liked them.

“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal, upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?” Lincoln said. “If that Declaration is not the truth, let us get the statute-book in which we find it and tear it out….”

Confronted with the gap between what Americans professed to believe and the reality of what they practiced, Lincoln’s crowd of Republican voters objected. Today they would not.

I’ve taken to calling them the Bad Faith Party (BFP). ♫ If it wasn’t for bad faith, etc.

This story is from a couple of years ago:

People knew of Geraldine “Gerri” Santoro’s cause of death—an air embolism caused by a back-alley abortion—before they ever knew her name.

On June 8, 1964, the 28-year-old married woman and her lover, Clyde Dixon, checked into Connecticut’s now-closed Norwich Motel with no vacation suitcases or change of clothes for an overnight stay. Instead, she brought a catheter and a textbook. Santoro, six and a half months pregnant, was prepared to let Dixon perform her illegal abortion—that is, until she started hemorrhaging during the process and Dixon panicked, abandoning Santoro to bleed to death on the motel floor.

It wasn’t until the next day that a maid discovered Santoro’s naked body—her torso collapsed over her kneeling legs, with only blood-soaked sheets between her and the carpet.

Santoro’s body was photographed for crime scene documentation at the time; in April 1973, nine years after her death and just half a year after the passing of Roe v. Wade, Ms. magazine published the photo of Santoro. At the time, the body was anonymous to them.

“Never Again” was the headline that ran with the story and image, which quickly became an iconic symbol of the pro-choice movement. After the passing of Roe v. Wade, the editors at Ms. thought the struggle was finally over.

“At that point, we naively believed that would be the end of the story, and that never again would women be lying on the floor in their own blood in a hotel room because of a botched abortion,” says Suzanne Braun Levine, who served as Ms.‘s first editor from its founding in 1972 to 1988. “That once the Supreme Court had made that ruling, safe abortions would be available to everyone, everywhere.”

On the other end of the phone, Levine laughs.

Now tell me this circumstance isn’t going to happen again when these misogynist monsters overturn Roe:

Born on August 16, 1935, Gerri Twerdy grew up with ten brothers and four sisters in an old farmhouse in rural, South Coventry, Connecticut. In the 1995 documentary Leona’s Sister Gerri, her family and friends recall memories of her: She climbed trees to avoid the chores she disliked, she and her best friend would sneak out of school to change out of their dress code-mandated dresses and into their jeans when playing hooky, and she always smelled like Juicy Fruit gum.

But when she was just 18 years old, in a rush to get hitched before her best friend, Gerri decided to marry a man she had met four weeks prior at a bus stop. His name was Sam Santoro, and he would go on to father two daughters with Gerri—all of whom would become victims of his physical abuse. So when she met 43-year-old Clyde Dixon, a fellow employee at the Mansfield Training School who ostensibly cared for her, she took him as her lover when Sam was living and working in California. But when Gerri found herself pregnant and Sam, unknowing of everything and with an imminent return to Connecticut to visit Gerri and their daughters, she feared for her safety.

So Gerri, or “Margaret Reynolds” according to the motel ledger, checked in to the motel room with Dixon, only to die alone after Dixon had attempted and failed to abort the fetus with a catheter.

There is nothing in that situation that couldn’t happen today. The only difference is that today, in most places, Gerri Santoro could get a legal abortion and would not have to bleed to death in some sleazy motel.

Lest you think that women like Gerri will be able to obtain medical abortion these days and won’t have to resort to such methods, think again. The states that are outlawing abortion are also outlawing medical abortion and using it or helping someone else use it can result in jail time.

Example:

A new law limiting the use of abortion-inducing medication in Texas goes into effect Thursday.

The law makes it a felony to provide the medication after seven weeks of pregnancy, putting Texas at odds with federal regulations. It also makes it a crime to send the medication through the mail.

Medical abortion is the most common way women in Texas terminate their pregnancies, according to state data.

These new restrictions reflect a growing concern among abortion opponents about the rise of “self-managed” abortions, in which pregnant people obtain the medications from out-of-state or international providers, with or without a prescription.

There’s evidence that more women turn to self-managed abortions when legal abortion is restricted. Texans have been unable to access abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy since Sept. 1, when a controversial new ban went into effect.

“Texas is looking at the ways that people are navigating around restrictions and trying to essentially make that as unsafe and as frightening for people as possible in order to deter them,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior legal counsel for If/When/How, a reproductive justice legal group.

They know that this is what will happen instead and they are fine with that:

NBC’s Ben Collins reports:

Today, two election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, sued Gateway Pundit, alleging the site instigated a “deluge of harassment and threats.”

What Freeman alleges happened to her in the last year is deeply disturbing and is worth reading.

Ruby Freeman is a retired 911 operator who ran a small business selling accessories.

With workers dropping out due to COVID, her daughter, Shaye Moss, asked her to help count ballots in Atlanta. Freeman signed on as a temp.

Weeks later, the FBI would tell her to flee her home.

The trouble started a month after the election.

On Dec. 3, a Trump campaign lawyer presented surveillance footage to Georgia’s State Senate, claiming someone who “had the name Ruby across her shirt somewhere” found a “suitcase” full of ballots from “underneath a table.”

This is pretty easy to explain: Election workers were told to pack up for the night, so they put the ballots away. Later in the night, they were told to restart the vote, and not wait until the morning.

Freeman started counting votes again.

But conspiracy theorists raced to identify the woman with the “suitcase.” They noticed she had a purse that said “LaRuby” on it. That’s Freeman’s business.

This was enough for Gateway Pundit, which led with a photo and this sentence:

“Her name is Ruby Freeman.”

Gateway Pundit titled their story on Freeman “What’s Up, Ruby? Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED.”

The coverage went on for months, despite constant reality checks from Georgia’s Secretary of State and Bureau of Investigation.

This “investigation,” as Gateway Pundit called it, was quickly picked up by OAN.

Then-President Trump tweeted the video of OAN and Gateway Pundit’s Ruby Freeman investigation.

In the meantime, Freeman could no longer answer her phone, inundated with harassment.

Twice, strangers went to Freeman’s home and attempted to perform a “citizens’ arrest.” When Freeman wasn’t home, strangers would then harass her neighbors.

Around the holidays, Freeman was sent Christmas cards from harassers, the suit says.

“Ruby please report to the FBI and tell them you committed voter fraud. If not you will be sorry,” read one.

Let’s take a break here to remind you what Freeman did to deserve all of this:

She moved ballots that had been put away for the night from underneath a table to above a table, then counted them.

The news trickling out of various countries and among researchers is contradictory and confusing. It’s early days and that’s to be expected.

Vox lists five criteria to keep your eye on for assessing just how bad (or not) it is:

There are several indicators to monitor in the next few weeks — none dispositive on their own, but which, taken together, should start to give us a better idea of what we are facing.

1) Cases in South Africa

We don’t actually know that the omicron variant originated in South Africa or Botswana, the countries that alerted the world to it. They were just the first to detect it, thanks to their world-leading genetic sequencing capabilities.

Nevertheless, because it is really good at sequencing, South Africa is an early omicron “hot zone” that should have one of the most complete pictures of how the variant is affecting the virus’s spread. Experts are already watching the country closely to see how much cases rise in the coming days.

So far, the answer has been: quite a lot. At the beginning of November, South Africa was seeing about 349 new Covid-19 cases every day on average. As of December 1, it is averaging almost 3,800 new cases daily.

Experts say other factors could be contributing to that steep increase, like South Africa’s low vaccination rate (29 percent of its people have had at least one dose), as well as possible superspreader events.

The question will be how much omicron alone is driving the surge and how much cases there ultimately swell. The more they spike, the more reason for concern.

2) Hospitalizations in Israel

Case numbers will give us some idea whether omicron is driving new surges. Another key question is whether it causes more severe illness than the delta variant, with more people developing serious symptoms, ending up in the hospital, and possibly dying.

That would portend a much grimmer picture of the future than if the variant were to prove to be less dangerous than delta. And while there has been early speculation on this, we do not have nearly enough information to say confidently which way it will go.

One metric to watch, according to experts: What happens to hospitalization numbers in Israel? It’s another country that is very good at tracking Covid data. It’s also a rich country with comparable vaccination levels to the US and an aggressive booster strategy. It could be a microcosm of what the United States can expect from omicron.

“Israel is pretty responsive in terms of taking action, also well vaccinated and boosted,” Bill Hanage, a Harvard University epidemiologist, told me. “A proxy for a place that mostly does things right and an early indicator of what can be expected in similar places.”

Omicron has been detected in Israel, but it’s still early. Hospitalizations are a lagging indicator: It takes time for a person to contract the virus and then develop serious enough symptoms that they go to the hospital.

Omicron could take over the pandemic, like delta — or fizzle like beta and gamma, variants you’ve probably already forgotten about. One way to tell if it’s becoming dominant is that the share of cases — in the US and elsewhere — caused by omicron will start rising.

“Delta is still the dominant variant in the US,” Jen Kates, director of HIV and global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me, “and that should be the prime concern for anyone.”

But if omicron is the next dominant variant, that should start to change soon. We know omicron is in the United States already; what we don’t know is whether it can outcompete delta. This metric is where that answer will ultimately show up.

The first three indicators are straightforward and easy for everyone to grasp: Are cases rising? Are hospitalizations increasing? Is omicron making up a bigger share of infections? Simple stuff.

But there are two more worth monitoring that are much more technical, but crucial to understanding omicron’s transmission.

The first is known as intrinsic transmissibility, as described by virologist Trevor Bedford of Fred Hutch on Twitter.

In brief, that means: Assuming nobody had immunity against any form of Covid-19, how quickly would the omicron variant spread through the population? For each infected person, how many more people would they infect? This is the R0 metric you might recall from the spring of 2020.

As scientists identify more omicron cases and gather more data on the people who are getting infected with it, they will be better able to estimate what that R0 actually is. As Bedford explained, some rough math based on the early data from South Africa suggests omicron’s R0 may fall anywhere from roughly 3 (meaning one infected person would infect three more people on average) to 6 or more.

5) Immune escapability

But, to complicate the issue further, we don’t actually live in a world where nobody has immunity to Covid. People have been vaccinated, or they’ve been infected with other versions of the virus and recovered. Omicron’s ability to evade this immunity will also factor significantly into its ability to transmit in the real world.

Figuring that out will depend on more sequencing to identify omicron cases and more information on which patients are contracting the variant. Then scientists can plug the statistics into their models and more accurately project how often vaccinated people or people infected by the previous variants are coming down with omicron. There also might be a difference between how well the variant can elude natural immunity versus immunity via vaccination. With delta, one CDC study found unvaccinated people were more prone to reinfection than vaccinated people.

Combining intrinsic transmissibility and immune escapability should give us a better idea of how quickly omicron is likely to spread. But it’s still worth knowing to what degree transmission is being driven by unvaccinated people who are being infected for the first time, versus those who were vaccinated or have recovered from Covid-19.

If the omicron variant has high intrinsic transmissibility but low immune escapability, then the primary threat is to unvaccinated people. That would indicate the vaccines are holding up well against it, but the virus could tear through unprotected populations.

But another possibility is that omicron has relatively low intrinsic transmissibility, but higher immune escapability. Unvaccinated people are still fully vulnerable to the virus in that scenario. But that would also mean vaccinated people could be at higher risk than they currently are, and omicron-specific boosters might even be necessary.

“High immune escape, lower intrinsic transmissibility is not necessarily a good thing,” Bedford pointed out. “Higher immune escape places previously infected and vaccinated individuals more at risk.”

It will take time to answer those questions. But only once they are answered will we really know how much omicron will alter the course of the pandemic.

This, by the way, is how the right wing is handling this:

I’m afraid he is delusional. Johns Hopkins just released a study showing that people in red states are 50% more likely to die from COVID. 50%!!!

A big shout-out to the Washington Post’s Philip Bump for putting this “More people have died under Biden” trope in needed context. I hope talking heads on MSNBC and CNN read it:

We are now as far from the inauguration of Joe Biden as the inauguration was from the day in March 2020 when the pandemic for many Americans became tangible: when actor Tom Hanks announced his infection with the coronavirus and when the NBA halted its season. In other words, the pandemic can now be divided cleanly into two halves, the first managed at the federal level by Donald Trump and the second managed by his successor.

Those two halves were not equivalent. The first half, the one that occurred during Trump’s administration, took a while to ramp up. While the country was riveted by the increasing number of cases for much of the spring, it wasn’t until late June that the country was seeing 40,000 new cases a day. In part, this was a function of limited testing; the actual number of cases was certainly far higher. Even without those untested cases, though, the first half of the pandemic saw slightly more cases than the second half. Here’s how they broke out by state.

The second half of the pandemic unfolded as the country had access to vaccines that could reduce infection and largely prevent the worst-case effects of covid-19. That, too, took a while to ramp up. The number of deaths per state looks like this:

There are some important bits of context to those numbers, though. The reduced number of deaths is a function not solely of the vaccine rollout but also of the fact that so many early cases went undetected. If the number of cases in the first half was significantly higher than measured, then it would make sense that the number of deaths would also be higher. It’s also the case that the vast majority of the deaths in the second half of the pandemic were among the unvaccinated; if the virus is still spreading broadly among those without protection, the number of deaths won’t be tamped down very much. And of course, it takes a while for coronavirus cases to progress from infection to death, so some of the cases that have been recorded will unfortunately end up in that more dire category.

How Biden and Trump actually compare on coronavirus deaths

Another important context for the graphics above is that the coloration, based on 2020 presidential vote, is misleading. There are a lot more people in Biden-voting blue states than Trump-voting red ones.

Adjusting for population allows us to see how the first and second halves of the pandemic played out on a state level. The Northeast, hit hard by the virus at the beginning of the pandemic, saw broad drops in the number of cases and deaths per capita in the second half of the pandemic. Many of the states that saw the biggest increases in per-capita deaths in the second half of the pandemic are ones that Trump won handily last year.

The correlation between the change in death toll and 2020 vote margin isn’t huge, but it exists. (The correlation between vaccination rates and 2020 vote margin is huge.)

The picture is made more clear if we categorize states and then counties specifically by 2020 vote and type. (Election data for Alaska doesn’t map onto counties, so the state is excluded from those calculations.) In the first half of the pandemic, Trump-voting states saw more cases but fewer deaths than Biden-voting ones. Then that flipped. (Florida is a swing state here, having voted for Trump by fewer than five points, and it helps drive up the per-capita values for that category.)

On a county level, the first-and-second-half divide is more stark. Trump- and Biden-voting counties saw similar case and death rates in the first half of the pandemic, but in the second half, President Biden’s half, the rate of cases was 1.4 times higher in Trump-voting counties, and the rate of deaths 1.6 times higher. This correlates to the urban-rural divide, too.

The inevitable frustration for Biden, of course, is that his handling of the second half of the pandemic is largely driven by the toll of the virus — something that is disproportionately a function of the places that didn’t vote for him. But that’s a challenge that comes with the job. And by now he’s been about as responsible for managing the pandemic as was his predecessor.

Ok, ok. But it’s clear that he is being sabotaged in his efforts by a cynical, nihilistic GOP and its propagandists in the media who are treating their own voters as human sacrifices by tacitly encouraging them not to get vaccinated in order to regain power in Washington. How exactly is any president supposed to deal with something like that? It’s so immoral and beyond the pale that we don’t really have any tools in the democratic toolbox.

These people are so far gone that they are willing to die for that orange-faced monster. And the Republican establishment is fully on board, even paying people not to get vaccinated in some red states and threatening to shut down the government over vaccine mandates.

Yes, it’s his responsibility to handle the pandemic. But he’s fighting more than COVID. He’s fighting a full-blown Death Cult.

Chris Hayes took a hard look at Trump around the time he tested positive for COVID and just carried on spreading it to everyone in sight:

And this twitter thread about Trump testing positive for COVID before the presidential debate adds some important details:

After reading coverage and talking to sources about Trump’s positive covid test, a few small points that stick out to me, as a health reporter. Trump hid his positive test from the most senior health officials fighting covid — Birx, Fauci, Hahn, Azar, etc

It’s symbolic of Trump’s entire response: the very officials charged with trying to contain a national covid outbreak (that the president often played down) didn’t have access to relevant information about a possible covid outbreak in their own workplace.

From Meadows’ description and the Guardian’s summary, it sounds like Trump was tested with an unnamed rapid test — and after his positive result, that same sample was rerun, somewhat later, through another antigen test.

This is not the way to do accurate coronavirus testing.

Some of Trump’s political allies had warned against relying on antigen tests.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had a false positive antigen test that forced him to cancel an Aug 2020 meeting with Trump — prompting DeWine to publicly stress the need for PCR tests to get the truth.

The Cleveland Clinic, which hosted the Sept. 29 debate, said after Trump’s public covid diagnosis on Oct. 2 that it believed guests had “low risk of exposure.”

The clinic didn’t respond on Wednesday to questions about whether it was still “low risk,” given the new info.

• 

• 

Cleveland Clinic also declined to answer a question on whether it should’ve just tested Trump itself.

Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic are arguably the world’s two most renowned hospital systems. Both suffered PR black eyes in their dealings with Trump White House last year.

PENCE flouts Mayo Clinic policy that everyone on campus wear a mask, even as he meets with staff and a patient. pic.twitter.com/kfo64KQDhU

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) April 28, 2020

Anyway. Know I’m posting these thoughts a bit late, but only now getting a chance to read all the stories. Thanks to @AshleyRParker @jdawsey1 @AnnieLinskey @feliciasonmez @tylerpager for letting me chip in with ours.

Originally tweeted by Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) on December 2, 2021.

Trump’s doctors and close associates aided and abetted the cover up of his condition.

Here’s hoping that the Select COVID Committee in the House calls all of them up to the hill for a chat.

As far as I’m concerned this was a case of reckless endangerment at best. And when it comes to Trump I’m quite sure he knew that he could be exposing and Biden to the virus (he was clearly sick as you can see in the video above) and that he could be killing him. Of course he did.