So Donald Trump has been accused of mishandling classified information and destroying documents. Guess what Fox News is talking about?
They just can’t quit her.
*BTW: There is absolutely zero evidence that Clinton is thinking of running again. Please. Their fever dreams are simply pathetic at this point.
I thought Joe Biden was the president with a heart but this decision suggests otherwise. Afghanistan is on the verge of a horrific humanitarian disaster. Kids are starving. And the administration has decided to take half the money that’s been frozen in American banks and give it to 9/11 victims.
President Biden is starting to clear a legal path for relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to pursue $3.5 billion that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York before the Taliban takeover, while also seeking to steer a roughly equal amount toward spending to aid the Afghan people.
Beginning that process, Mr. Biden issued an executive order Friday morning invoking emergency powers to consolidate and freeze all $7 billion of the total assets the Afghan central bank kept in New York. The administration said it would ask a judge for permission to move $3.5 billion to a trust fund it would set up to support the needs of the Afghan people, like for humanitarian relief.
The highly unusual set of moves, which The New York Times had first reported was expected, is meant to address a tangled knot of legal, political, foreign policy and humanitarian problems stemming from the attacks and the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
When the Afghan government dissolved in August — with top officials, including its president and the acting governor of its central bank, fleeing the country — it left behind slightly more than $7 billion in central bank assets on deposit at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. Because it was no longer clear who — if anyone — had legal authority to gain access to that account, the Fed made the funds unavailable for withdrawal.
The Taliban, now in control of Afghanistan, immediately claimed a right to the money. But a group of relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, one of several sets who had won default judgments against the group in once seemingly quixotic lawsuits years ago, sought to seize it to pay off that debt.
Meanwhile, the economy in Afghanistan has been collapsing, leading to a mass starvation that is in turn creating an enormous and destabilizing new wave of refugees — and raising a clear need for extensive spending on humanitarian relief.
Against that backdrop, the White House’s National Security Council led months of deliberations on the central bank funds involving top officials from departments including Justice, State and Treasury, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that had not yet been made public.
The money belonging to the Afghan central bank — known as Da Afghanistan Bank — includes assets like currency, bonds and gold.
Much of it came from foreign exchange funds that accumulated over the past 20 years — a time when the United States and other Western countries were donating large sums to Afghanistan, helping generate that activity. Alex Zerden, a former top U.S. Treasury Department official in Afghanistan, characterized the central bank reserves as a kind of rainy day fund for the Afghan people.
I understand the impulse. But honestly, this is wrong. If the 9/11 victims need this compensation then give it to them. But don’t take it away from starving Afghan kids.
This is political, of course. They are afraid of the Republican criticism that they are giving money to terrorists, just as Donald Trump criticized Obama for unfreezing Iran’s assets as part of the Iran nuclear deal. They need to stop being afraid. These Republicans would say it even if it wasn’t true and their people would believe it. There is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost.
I know it’s a bitter pill that the Taliban are back in charge of Afghanistan and it’s not as if I’m a big fan. They are fundamentalist monsters. Not my favorite people. But the Afghan kids don’t deserve to be punished, especially after all that’s happened over the last 20 years.
It’s been quite a week for Donald Trump and his henchmen. The House Jan. 6 committee finally subpoenaed his former trade adviser, Peter Navarro, who has been telling anyone who will listen about his plot to overturn the election. It was reported that Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen on “The Masked Singer,” called a Michigan prosecutor shortly after the 2020 election and asked him to turn over voting machines in one county to Trump’s team. And the National Archives has reportedly sent a referral to the Department of Justice regarding all the White House documents Trump absconded with and shipped to Mar-a-Lago, some of which were reportedly marked as classified or top secret. Oh, and it turns out there were major gaps (of more than 15 minutes) in the White House presidential call records on Jan. 6 and that Trump at least sometimes tried to flush documents down a White House toilet.
Taking the last items first, let’s stipulate that Trump’s non-compliance with the Presidential Records Act has been known for some time. It was previously reported that he routinely tore up documents and his staff had to rifle through the trash and tape them back together. He refused to use a secure phone and half his staff, including his daughter, used personal email accounts. Trump was even alleged to have eaten documents at one point. This new story, reported by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman in her forthcoming book “Confidence Man,” that plumbers were repeatedly called to service a toilet in the White House which had become clogged with papers that “someone” had tried to flush, is entirely in keeping with all the reports about Trump’s refusal to adhere to laws about record keeping.
As for stealing documents and mementos that rightly belong to the National Archives, that’s par for the course as well. Recall that during Trump’s notorious trip to France for the World War I memorial (where he didn’t want to get his hair mussed) he pretty much ransacked the U.S. ambassador’s house, sending whatever he took a liking to back to Washington. He clearly believed the had the prerogative and authority to take whatever he wanted, which apparently included such historical documents as the letters he received from North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, as well as others that were clearly classified.
Trump responded to these reports with one of his extended Twitter-esque “statements,” but this one was clearly drafted by a lawyer and later larded up with Trumpish embellishments, suggesting that there is some concern about his legal exposure. But you have to love the fact that despite the clear obligations outlined in the explicitly-named Presidential Records Act, he claims he was told he was “under no obligation to give this material.” He truly does not believe that any rules ever apply to him.
In reporting this overt act of lawbreaking, mainstream media went to great lengths to explain that it would be difficult for prosecutors to determine his intent, so this is probably another example of the Teflon Don getting away with it. But it’s hard to think of any possible reason for ripping, flushing or stealing documents unless you really doesn’t want others to see them.
Meanwhile, this Politico story reports that Rudy Giuliani had been trying to seize voting machines as far back as Nov. 20, 2020. Until now there was no evidence that this daft idea had gone beyond being floated among various executive branch officials, but apparently Giuliani actually made that request to prosecutor James Rossiter in Antrim County, Michigan (the focus of various MAGA World conspiracy theories). Rossiter said he told Giuliani, “‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause.” Since Giuliani first became famous as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. I’m pretty sure he knew that.
This sheds some light on the odd fact that Giuliani was reportedly the one who put his foot down during the notorious White House meeting when Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn urged Trump to use the military to seize voting machines. Clearly Giuliani wasn’t against the seizure itself. After all, he later approached the Department of Homeland Security about doing it, and now we know he reached out to at least one local official. It would appear that Giuliani and Powell had competing theories about the predicate for seizing voting machines. Powell was pushing the theory that foreign actors (China, Venezuela, Italy, etc.) had stolen the election. That hypothetically created a national security issue, which she and Flynn believed would allow the president to order the military to intervene. Giuliani thought the better story was that Democrats and local officials had rigged the machines, so the national security issue didn’t hold water. The fight wasn’t over whether to seize voting machines, but exactly how and why.
What seems clear in all this reporting is that Trump didn’t care what theory anyone came up with — he just wanted to overturn the election by any means necessary. He was willing to run with whatever worked. It’s unclear, even today, exactly how he claims to explain this alleged massive fraud, coordinated and carried out with amazing precision.
That brings us back to Peter Navarro’s subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee which he promptly refused, claiming executive privilege. When asked about the subpoena by the New York Times he responded by email, attacking a wide array of fellow Republicans as disloyal to the Leader:
[Mike] Pence betrayed Trump. Marc Short [Pence’s former chief of staff] is a Koch Network dog. [Mark] Meadows is a fool and a coward. [Liz] Cheney and [Adam] Kinzinger are useful idiots for Nancy Pelosi and the woke Left.
He seems wound a little tight, don’t you think?
Navarro is an unusual case, since he has written a book openly admitting that he and Steve Bannon concocted a plot to allow Trump to steal the election. In the book and in these interviews with MSNBC’s Ari Melber, he explains that his “Green Bay Sweep” required one member of the House and one member of the Senate to object to the electoral count in each of the battleground states where Trump claimed he actually won. Then Mike Pence would declare that the electoral count could not be determined and he would “send it back to the states,” where the legislatures would determine who had really won. Navarro insists he had no idea about the slates of “alternate electors” that were already in place in those states (which is hard to believe) and that this ridiculous plan is clearly outlined in the Constitution (which it certainly is not). He claims he had 100 members of Congress lined up to help him with his plan, although he has declined to name them.
Trump, Giuliani and Navarro are not hiding what they’ve done. They are betting there is no mechanism strong enough to hold them accountable, as long as the Republican establishment continues to support them. There’s little sign that will change so all of this is likely being done just for the historical record. What with all the book-banning the right wing is doing these days, I wouldn’t count on anyone learning the real story in the future.
Montana Sen. Jon Tester told David Axelrod (the Axe Files podcast) that Democrats cannot be a majority party unless they begin showing up more in “the area between the two mountain ranges, the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains.” By majority party, Tester is viewing from his perch in the U.S. Senate, a body that by design is tilted toward smaller, less populated states where Republicans dominate.
CNN:
Tester, who was critical of Democrats’ messaging and appeal to rural Americans following the 2020 presidential election, also told Axelrod rural Americans view the Democratic Party as “toxic.”
“It’s toxic. The national Democratic brand in, I think in rural America generally, is toxic, and it’s because, quite frankly, we don’t show up,” he said when asked how his Montana neighbors view the Democratic Party. “I’m talking about national Democrats. We’re not willing to go places we’re not wanted and answer questions.”
He continued, “I think it’s critically important if you’re going to win, you’ve got to go to those places, as miserable as it might be, you still go. You still contact the people, and you still let people know that you’re a human being and you have a view for this, a vision for this country.”
Through the mechanism of the Electoral College, the same structure that over-represents Republican voters in the Senate disincentivizes Democratic national campaigns from campaigning “between the two mountain ranges” when voters are paying the most attention. After the primaries, the most heavily populated, more-urbanized states get the most attention. They are where the electoral votes are.
But winning the White House that way is not enough to retake control in the Senate. Policies that benefit rural America are not enough. Like it or not, Democrats are faced with convincing rural voters, as Tester has in Montana, that they don’t have horns and tails.
You must be present to win. That is why this Howard Dean quote from his days as DNC chair appears on the inside cover of my get-out-the-vote planner:
“We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years. If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.” – Gov. Howard Dean
Matt Bai, “The Inside Agitator,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 1, 2006
Even though Dean’s 50-state plan was bearing fruit in rural America, once Barack Obama took the White House, he cancelled the project.
While acknowledging that the victories cannot be exclusively tied to Dean’s gambit, Governing noted in 2013:
… the patterns are suggestive. In the 20 states we looked at — those that have voted solidly Republican in recent presidential races — Democratic candidates chalked up modest successes, despite the difficult political terrain. Then, after the project stopped, Democratic success rates cratered.
[…]
In these 20 solidly red states, the Democrats controlled 13 legislative chambers in 2005, a number that fell to just three in 2013. Of the 40 chambers in these states, only two experienced a net gain of Democratic seats between 2005 and 2013; in the other 38, the Democrats lost ground.
And because state legislative seats and lower statewide offices provide the “bench” for future runs for governor and Congress, these developments could prompt a self-perpetuating death spiral for the party in these states.
Libertarian leanings in the Great Plains and West made Democrats’ chances better there than among Christian conservatives in the South.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single op-ed admonishing Republicans for not appealing more to urban Americans,” responds journalist Simon Owens. But that’s the GOP’s problem and why the Republican Party nationwide is shrinking.
National Democrats’ absence in much of rural America is why the map above is so red between the two mountain ranges.
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Waking up to news that hate crimes are at an all-time high does not exactly shout TGIF. But here we are, America.
The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University recently reported full and partial statistics showing that hate crimes spiked almost 50 percent in 2021.
By the numbers: An analysis of 14 major metropolitan areas with fully and partly reported data found that hate crimes surged 46% from the previous year.
The intrigue: Though Black Americans remained the most targeted group in most cities, anti-Asian American hate crimes increased 339% in 2021, the preliminary report found.
The spike reflects an 11 percent increase in “suspected hate crimes reported to police across a dozen of America’s largest cities,” NBC News reported.
Tell it to D’Monterrio Gibson, 24, a Black FedEx driver in Brookhaven, Mississippi. The FBI is investigating an attack on him as a hate crime.
Gibson was delivering packages around 7 p.m. in late January when a white pickup truck from the neighborhood began blowing its horn and chasing his rental truck (CNN):
The van Gibson was driving was a Hertz rental van that had two large Hertz stickers on the back, Gibson said. Gibson’s attorney, Carlos E. Moore, told CNN that Gibson was wearing a FedEx jacket, shirt and pants but the vehicle had no FedEx markings.
Gibson said he thought he was in the truck’s way and so he tried to leave, but the truck swerved around him and tried to cut him off.
“At that point my instincts kick in, and I swerve around him as he (is) trying to cut me off to avoid getting stuck in the neighborhood,” he said.
Gibson said he drove down the street about two or three houses when a man in the middle of the road pointed a gun at his vehicle and was mouthing and waving at Gibson to stop. Gibson said he shook his head “no” to indicate he wasn’t going to stop and then hid behind his steering wheel while he swerved around him.
That’s when Gibson heard “at least five shots and heard the bullets hitting the van,” according to an incident report filed January 25 by the Brookhaven Police Department after officers met with Gibson and his boss.
Even with bullet holes in his van, police were not taking Gibson seriously. They asked, “Did you do anything to make them think you were suspicious?” To Gibson, that was ” a slap in the face.”
Brandon Case was charged with feloniously attempting to cause bodily injury with a firearm and a deadly weapon by shooting at an occupied vehicle with Gibson inside, according to an affidavit provided to CNN by the Brookhaven Municipal Court, signed January 31.
Gregory Case was charged with unlawfully and feloniously conspiring with Brandon Case to commit aggravated assault by attempting to cause bodily injury to Gibson, the affidavit, signed February 1, states.
His attackers, both White men, father and son, were not arrested for eight days.
Gibson’s attorney observed that had the roles been reversed, his client would have been immediately arrested and charged with attempted murder.
That’s how much impresssion the father-son murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia made in Mississippi.
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Oh look. The media finally sends out an intrepid reporter to take the temperature of some Biden voters. They seem as exotic as rare birds:
Dozens of suburban moms from around the country dialed into an Ohio-based Zoom training session last month with the same goal — to learn how to combat the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric from parents whose protests over mask mandates and diversity education have turned school board meeting rooms into battlegrounds.
The lessons: Show up at meetings with fact-based speeches ready and create text groups for real-time strategizing. Wave “jazz hands” if told not to clap at meetings. Avoid using the divisive language of their opponents, such as “CRT” for critical race theory, and instead replace it with alternatives like “culturally responsive instruction.”
Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine and Blue — a national network of like-minded, mostly Democratic suburban women — believes the only way to fight back is to present a calm face to counter the angry groups that have dominated and disrupted board meetings and in some cases threatened officials. Her network of more than 300,000 women recently broadened its focus to fight the rising number of book bans across the country, launching a case tracker on Jan. 31, and is running training sessions to help women testify and manage highly charged government meetings.
“We believe it’s time to get off defense,” Paris said. “Why should we be the ones explaining ourselves? This is not why we moved to the suburbs. We moved to the suburbs for high-quality schools.”
Their mission has taken on new urgency after the wave of Republican parents who began showing up at school board meetings last summer using scripts written by right-wing think tanks, denouncing the teaching of topics such as transgender rights and labeling anti-racism curriculum as critical race theory — a college-level academic framework that examines systemic racism. They then moved on to books, mostly those focused on race and racial history, including by some of the country’s most renowned authors — as well as books with LGBTQ content. They often were the same parents who protested mask mandates and school closures related to the coronavirus pandemic.
Paris argues that these parents — while vocal — don’t represent the views of most parents, and in some cases books have been removed and curriculums changed after complaints from just a few.
“I don’t think that they represent any kind of majority but they certainly are part of what I would say is a pretty massive orchestrated effort to undermine public education and teachers in the country, impose a political agenda and win back suburban voters,” Paris said.
Conservative parents in Tennessee, for example, were so well organized and aggressive that those trying to marshal opposition found themselves outmaneuvered, according to Revida Rahman, 48, a Brentwood, Tenn., mother of two and co-founder of racial equity group One WillCo. The parents had scoured the second-grade curriculum looking for what they considered inappropriate content. They packed raucous school board meetings and papered carpool lanes with fliers warning that school curriculums were promoting the ideas of “Bad Angry White People” and “cannibalism.”
“I get frustrated with the Democrats’ lack of movement, to be quite transparent,” said Rahman, who recently joined Red Wine and Blue. “I think the other side has an engine that is always moving. They have a playbook. They’re playing chess and we’re playing Go Fish or something.”
I get that. But this sort of grassroots action is much more effective anyway. Good for them.
That’s one story of parents fighting these people back. I’m sure it will spawn 57 competing stories of angry white people screaming at school boards. But it’s something.
I can’t think of anyone I consider to be more ideologically incorrect than Liz Cheney. In a normal world I would be terrified that she could possibly become the first woman president. (I’ve even written that…) But we don’t live in a normal world and I think her political career is probably over, which is a relief in terms of that particular nightmare.
However, she is right about this and it’s to her credit that she hasn’t backed down now that her positioning on this doesn’t seem to have helped her future prospects (at least not yet):
Article II and the 12th Amendment govern how the nation selects the president. Congress doesn’t select the president; the states do. Every state in the union now selects a presidential candidate through a popular vote. And every state identifies the manner in which disputes regarding the election are addressed under state law. Those laws set forth a process for challenging an election when concerns arise, including potential recounts or audits and an opportunity to litigate disputed issues in court. When courts have resolved any election challenges, and the election result has been certified by the governor of a state, the election is over. That is the rule of law.
The 12th Amendment also leaves little doubt that Congress must count the certified electoral votes it receives from the states: “The president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes for president, shall be the president.” This provision doesn’t say, for example, Congress must count certified electoral votes unless it has concerns about fraud allegations, or unless it disagrees with the outcome of state or federal court litigation. And the vice president, as president of the Senate presiding over the count, can’t simply refuse to count a state’s certified slate of electoral votes—either under the Constitution or under the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
Republicans used to advocate fidelity to the rule of law and the plain text of the Constitution. In 2020, Mr. Trump convinced many to abandon those principles. He falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him because of widespread fraud. While some degree of fraud occurs in every election, there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that could have changed this one. As the Select Committee will demonstrate in hearings later this year, no foreign power corrupted America’s voting machines, and no massive secret fraud changed the election outcome.
Almost all members of Congress know this—although many lack the courage to say it out loud. Mr. Trump knew it too, from his own campaign officials, from his own appointees at the Justice Department, and from the dozens of lawsuits he lost. Yet, Mr. Trump ignored the rulings of the courts and launched a massive campaign to mislead the public. Our hearings will show that these falsehoods provoked the violence on Jan. 6. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have begun to pay the price for spreading these lies. For example Rudy Giuliani’s license to practice law has been suspended because he “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump, ” in the words of a New York appellate court.
The Jan. 6 investigation isn’t only about the inexcusable violence of that day: It is also about fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law, and whether elected representatives believe in those things or not. One member of the House Freedom Caucus warned the White House in the days before Jan. 6 that the president’s plans would drive “a stake in the heart of the federal republic.” That was exactly right.
Those who do not wish the truth of Jan. 6 to come out have predictably resorted to attacking the process—claiming it is tainted and political. Our hearings will show this charge to be wrong. We are focused on facts, not rhetoric, and we will present those facts without exaggeration, no matter what criticism we face. My friend the late Charles Krauthammer once said: “The lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.” Every generation of Americans has fulfilled its duty to support and defend the Constitution. That responsibility now falls to us.
It sure doesn’t appear that the Republican Party is going to participate in the saving of the Constitution. One would like to believe that would wake up people like Cheney and others who see what’s happening to the fact that there is something deeply toxic at the heart of the Party. Some of the apostates like Stuart Stevens have re-evaluated the entire ideology and recognized the intrinsic rot, but many have not. (Some of that is based mostly on antagonism toward the left and the ultra-left.)
But the Party itself is simply too far gone for reclamation. They’re going to have to go back to square one if they hope to avoid fully embracing modern neo-fascism and I see little evidence of that happening. It’s going to be up to the Democrats to do the heavy lifting. I hope they are up to it.
I, too, laughed when my Australian friend sent me the Guardian article. But I can think of no better way to illustrate the importance of funding good public schools than Greene’s gaffe. The ignorance and paranoia in Greene’s mistake points also to how important it is to teach multicultural and anti-racist values — and not to back away from doing so when bigots challenge us. If ever there was someone who needed to read Maus when she was 12 — and have a focused discussion about Holocaust history in school, home, and/or church — it was Marjorie Taylor Greene.
More suspicious “sloppy” record keeping:
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has discovered gaps in official White House telephone logs from the day of the riot, finding few records of calls by President Donald J. Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them.
Investigators have not uncovered evidence that any official records were tampered with or deleted, and it is well known that Mr. Trump used his personal cellphone, and those of his aides, routinely to talk with aides, congressional allies and outside confidants.
But the sparse call records are the latest major obstacle to the panel’s central mission: recreating what Mr. Trump was doing behind closed doors during crucial moments of the assault on Congress by a mob of his supporters.
Ron Brownstein on CNN said it best:
The question is going to be whether Donald Trump can get away with flouting and barreling through so many laws and customs and norms that we thought limited the exercise of arbitrary presidential power. Everything from firing Inspectors General, extorting the government of Ukraine, to politicizing the census to it appears a far reaching effort to undermine the election to violating the presidential records act.
On all of these fronts, Trump simply barreled through what we thought in the past were barriers on misbehavior of the president. He did no on all of those fronts with silence from the Republican congress who were outraged about Hillary Clinton’s email in 2016. It wasn’t just Donald Trump raising that alarm. There were an awful lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill.
I think really the question that is facing the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies, like the Georgia Grand jury that is looking at this is, if we don’t put any sanction on Trump for all of these behaviors, you are essentially guaranteeing that you are going to get more misbehavior from a future president, whether him or somebody else. And you would think to an institutionalist like Merrick Garland, that would be a prospect that would concentrate the mind.
Allowing this man to not only get away with EVERYTHING he has done, but to continue to lead the Republican Party and run for office just two years from now should be unthinkable. Yet it’s sadly probable. And I think this may be the most frightening portent of our future of all. There are a lot of things moving in the wrong direction, but this signals an existential crisis.
Here’s the article:
From very early in the pandemic, it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 can damage the heart and blood vessels while people are acutely ill. Patients developed clots, heart inflammation, arrythmias, and heart failure.
Now, the first large study to assess cardiovascular outcomes 1 year after SARS-CoV-2 infection has demonstrated that the virus’ impact is often lasting. In an analysis of more than 11 million U.S. veterans’ health records, researchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 1 year earlier, compared with those who didn’t. The risk rose with severity of initial disease and extended to every outcome the team examined, including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected.
The results are “stunning … worse than I expected, for sure,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. “All of these are very serious disorders. … If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it’s not.” He adds that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.”
Others agree the results of the study, published in Nature Medicine on 7 February, are powerful. “In the post-COVID era, COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes,” greater than well-documented risks such as smoking and obesity, says Larisa Tereshchenko, a cardiologist and biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic, who recently conducted a similar, much smaller analysis. She cautions that the new study will need to be replicated, and that it was retrospective, possibly introducing inaccuracies such as incorporating faulty diagnoses from patient records. “It looked back. We have to do prospective studies to calculate accurate estimates.”
Nor do researchers know how the virus orchestrates this long-term damage. But they think the cardiovascular risks and the constellation of symptoms collectively known as Long Covid (which include brain fog, fatigue, weakness, and loss of smell) could have common roots.
“This is clearly evidence of long-term heart and vascular damage. Similar things could be happening in the brain and other organs resulting in symptoms characteristic of Long Covid, including brain fog,” says senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and chief of research at the VA St Louis Health Care system.
More at the link. The people studied were mostly older white men so there is more work to be done to see if this holds up for the rest of the population. But let’s just say it’s not exactly good news in any case.
Everyone is going to have their own tolerance for risk and people have different circumstances, age, general health etc that guide their decisions. But it seems to me that this meme of “I’m just going to get it and get it over with” isn’t a great idea. We just don’t know what the long term ramifications are yet. Maybe vaxxed people who get a mild case of COVID, or younger folks, don’t suffer these consequences but we just don’t know yet. I wouldn’t throw away your N95s just yet.