From the 19 children and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to the five people murdered at Club Q in Colorado Springs, countless lives have been impacted by mass shootings in the United States this year.
There is no official FBI definition of a mass shooting, so definitions vary from group to group. This means that there is no official number of mass shootings that occurred in 2022.
However, the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as a shooting in which there are four or more people shot or killed — not including the shooter — recorded 641 mass shootings in 2022 as of Dec. 28.
The online archive reported 690 mass shootings in 2021, the highest year on record. This means that 2022, with at least 641 mass shootings, had the second highest number of mass shootings in a year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Some other lists put it at the highest year on record. Either way, it’s a disgrace.
This year book-ended the horrific mass killing of first graders in Newtown Connecticut 10 years ago with the equally horrific mass killing of fourth graders in Uvalde, Texas, proving that we haven’t managed to do much of anything to stop these horrific mass shootings in the intervening years. If Uvalde is any example, the police training has actually regressed in that time.
This is a national shame. And while it was good that they managed to pass some minor gun safety regulations this year, it really wasn’t much. At this point it’s very hard to see what it would take to change this.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
The story goes on to lament the nation’s loss of local newspapers which is on track to have lost one-third of them by 2025. They quote Tim Franklin of the Medill School of journalism saying, “local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street. Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
That’s certainly true but it won’t do much good if nobody pays attention. This local paper had the story and it was potentially very juicy. The Democratic opponent tried to get the broader media interested and they didn’t care. I’m not sure what’s going to fix that.
When the 2020 presidential campaign was lurching into gear three years ago, former Vice President Joe Biden had led in the polls for months. Still, everyone kind of assumed he was a placeholder, a former office-holder with high name recognition whose campaign would nevertheless go the way of his two previous presidential bids, meaning nowhere. He was dull as dishwater compared to many of the others vying for the nomination, and nobody had ever really considered him presidential timber.
As the campaign took off, other candidates were winning in the early states even as Biden still led in national polls. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg looked like the major contenders after Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, states where Biden did poorly. Then he pulled off a sweeping victory in South Carolina and shortly thereafter the race was effectively over. He went on to win the rest of the primaries handily. America was reeling during the traumatic first year of the pandemic and there was a sense that Democrats were happy to have the race settled so they could concentrate on taking down Donald Trump, which was considered Job One by every faction of the Democratic coalition.
But Biden has turned out to be full of surprises. Rather than just acting as a kindly old caretaker president until the new generation can take the wheel, his administration has been a flurry of activity, passing more Democratic domestic legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. To name just a few, he signed into law the huge American Rescue Plan in the spring of 2021 (with no Republican votes); the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act, with massive investments in climate policy and health care; the $280 billion CHIPS Act, funding a vital semiconductor industry in the U.S.; the PACT Act to help veterans; and the first federal gun control legislation in almost 30 years. In the big omnibus spending bill just passed during the lame-duck session, he got the Electoral Count Act included as a step toward avoiding another Jan. 6 debacle. Finally, Biden pushed through and signed the Respect for Marriage Act, offering at least some protection to same-sex couples against the inevitable assault from right-wing judges and legislators. Some of that legislation was even bipartisan, which seems like something out of an old black-and-white movie at this point.Why the French hated, but now love “Emily In Paris,” says Philippine Leroy-BeaulieuKeep Watching
These achievements really are impressive, and even more so because of the need to accommodate the two Senate divas — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — who needed to be the center of attention at all times and who were unfortunately crucial to passing legislation. It was often torturous watching the Senate sausage-making, with Biden himself often appearing unable to manage the negotiations despite his alleged mastery of the process. But somehow it worked.
A lot of important items were left on the cutting room floor, of course, largely due to the aforementioned Diva Twins: No voting rights reform, no new child tax credit and no subsidies for the elderly. There are a dozen other worthy programs I could name. Important tax legislation was nixed by Sinema for inexplicable reasons. Nonetheless, what remained is substantial and meaningful, and frankly kind of miraculous considering the narrow Democratic majority and the toxic political climate.
Biden quietly led the party to those major wins but a lot of the credit must go to the Democrats in both houses who clearly appreciated that they had a unique opportunity to get things done before the batshit GOP regained some power. I wouldn’t have bet on that happening either.
Biden has also been getting federal judges confirmed as quickly as possible, outpacing both Obama and Trump. Just as important, these judges are all highly qualified (unlike the crew of misfits the Trump administration put forth), and are the most diverse group in history: Three-quarters are women, two-thirds are people of color and 11 are former public defenders, which is more than the number appointed by all previous presidents combined. As he promised, he nominated the first Black woman, the impressive Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court.
As for foreign policy, Biden inherited a global mess after Trump stomped all over the world like an orange Colossus, befriending every tyrant on the planet and treating allies like dirt. Biden has reset many of those relationships and as a result has been able to deftly manage U.S. involvement in Ukraine, unquestionably a delicate and dangerous crisis.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was proposed by both Obama and Trump but never actually carried out, was messy, but everyone knew it would be. Biden showed admirable resolve in going through with it anyway, even though he was hamstrung by Trump’s blunderbuss negotiations, and deserves credit rather than the outrageous moral preening by the press, which suddenly decided it cared about the Afghan people after ignoring them for years. That was a sickening bookend to the rah-rah cheerleading the media delivered when George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan 20 years earlier.
Biden also decided, against the advice of the Beltway punditocracy and most Democratic strategists, to use the bully pulpit to fight the Republicans on their extremism and the obvious threat they posed democracy. Biden’s critics claimed that people don’t care about that stuff and the presidential bully pulpit is a waste of breath anyway. The results of the 2022 midterms suggest that they were full of it and Biden’s instincts were correct.
I think some of this success, paradoxically, is because Joe Biden is our oldest president, not in spite of that fact. There’s a certain YOLO quality to many people his age which he seems to have channeled into a willingness to take calculated risks that have largely paid off. Dark Brandon’s seen it all — he doesn’t scare easily.
None other than former Speaker Newt Gingrich issued a warning to his fellow Republicans not long ago that they’re making a big mistake if they underestimate Biden and his team. He said that they were being foolish to obsess over Biden’s age and need to recognize that they are “up against a very methodical machine which has done a remarkable job. … When you look at results, you may dislike them philosophically, but you have to be realistic that these people have been effective. And you have to assume that they’re going to go into 2024 with a pretty powerful machine, running a juggernaut.”
Whether that football-coach analysis is accurate remains up for grabs but there is no doubt that the Biden administration has gotten a whole lot accomplished in two years under exceptionally difficult circumstances. Underestimating this president has been a mistake ever since he entered the race back in 2019.
The whining and handwringing from the right over the release of Trump’s tax returns is making me crazy. Seriously? The man who refused to release his returns as every other presidents for the past half century hve done, had foreign business entanglements, refused to divest his companies and was clearly still involved in the businesses throughout his term is running for president again! He officially announced it!
Getting Trump’s tax returns should not have been this hard. Every president elected since Richard Nixon—with the exception of Trump—has publicly disclosed his tax returns. Tax returns can tell the American people, and Congress, whether a president is following the law and behaving honestly. Crucially for Trump, who uniquely and inappropriately retained ownership of a massive international business while president, they can provide information about conflicts of interest that may have swayed his decision making.
They’re out. It’s going to take some time for the experts to sort through them and since they were not properly audited, the IRS probably didn’t have a lot of the back-up documentation they would have demanded to prove Trump’s claims.But experts should be able to tell a lot and we’ll know if due course.
Here’s one thing we’ve learned already:
“We have just learned that he did hold foreign bank accounts the entire time that he was in office…” pic.twitter.com/FTIS8n2F8U
WALLACE: No, Mr. President, I’m asking you a question. Will you tell us how much you paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017? TRUMP: Millions of dollars. WALLACE: So not 750? TRUMP: Millions of dollars. And you’ll get to see it. And you’ll get to see it. pic.twitter.com/Tz1IY3kyWl
When I think about this jerks screaming “lock her up!” for the past six years over alleged transgressions that are minuscule compared to this stuff it makes my head spin. And the prospect of their next jihad against Hunter Biden when their Dear leader is clearly a criminal of epic proportions it just makes me tired. Shamelessness is a powerful drug.
It finally happened at 9 a.m. ET this morning (NBC News):
A House committee made public six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday, the culmination of years of legal wrangling and speculation about what might be contained in the filings.
The House Ways and Means Committee had voted to make the thousands of pages of returns public in a party-line vote last week, but their release was delayed while staffers redacted sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers from the documents.
What is in there that Trump was so desperate for the world not to see? After all, he bragged in 2016 that paying no taxes made him smart. The smartest guy around. Why not showcase that brilliance?
Tax pros will study Trump’s 500 or so business empire of trusts, limited liability corporations and partnerships. But details will be limited (CBS News):
“On his return, there will be a white paper schedule in the back — it may be five or 10 pages long — it’s going to list all these entities,” said Bruce Dubinsky, a forensic accountant and founder of Dubinsky Consulting.
“We’re not going to know what those [entities] are doing. You’re just going see a line, and an amount — could be income, could be a loss — for that year. We would then need those LLC or S corporation returns to see, OK, what’s going on?”
Such a large number of entities makes it more likely that some sources of Trump’s income, losses or wealth could be left out, offering a misleading picture of his tax status. The IRS has highlighted the complexity of performing a comprehensive examination of Trump’s income and tax liability.
“With over 400 flow-thru returns reported on the Form 1040, it is not possible to obtain the resources available to examine all potential issues,” states an IRS memo cited in the Ways and Means report.
Investigative reporters such as Susanne Craig will try. Until they have time to review the forms and run down public information on the Trump Organization laundry list, we will have to wait to know much and to know, importantly, how much he owes to whom, especially to foreign creditors.
What we do know is that during Trump’s White House tenure, the Internal Revenue Service failed to initiate the customary audit of the sitting president’s taxes. We also know, to no one’s surprise, Trump wants vengeance (CNN):
Trump is already encouraging Republicans to retaliate against House Democrats by obtaining Biden’s financial records. In a campaign video released last week, he called the House Ways and Means Committee’s moves an “outrageous abuse of power” and a “deranged political witch hunt” that began when he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015.
[…]
“We should also get to the bottom line of how Biden, on a salary of a US senator, was able to buy one mansion after another; all these different locations,” Trump said. “When I’m president, we will expose the Washington cartel and we will make America great again.”
What we know already:
Trump paid $1.1 million in federal income tax in 2018 and 2019, in stark contrast to the $750 he paid in 2017 and $0 in 2020, according to the report from the Joint Committee on Taxation
Trump’s tax bill grew substantially as his income surged in 2018 and 2019. Trump reported a $22 million capital gain in 2018 and a $9 million gain in 2019 from asset sales, sending his income into the black following years of enormous losses.
In 2015 and 2016, Trump reported he lost more than $32 million each year. In 2017, Trump said he lost nearly $13 million. But he reported taxable income of $24 million in 2018 and more than $4 million in 2019, giving him a sizeable tax bill.
However, in 2020, as the pandemic hit, Trump once again reported a gigantic loss of nearly $5 million. He paid $0 in federal income taxes that year.
Meantime, celebrate Trump Tax Return Release Day in whatever ways suit you.
One of the pleasures of writing for an old-school blog is not being assigned a boring end-of-year review or best-of piece. Plenty of those this week elsewhere.
These two reports by BBC News Russia editor Steve Rosenberg are more relective. The first examines how Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed Russia.
“Special Military Operation” Russia feels different from both communist Russia and independent Russia. “The economy and industry here have been virtually put on a war footing,” says Rosenberg, since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Outside Gorky Park, along with festive fir trees, is a red star with the symbol of Russia’s ‘special military operation.’ As Russia prepares for the New Year holidays, I go onto the streets of Moscow to see how the invasion of Ukraine has changed Russia. @BBCNewspic.twitter.com/v876Lt3IC0
Not every Russian supports the war, Rosenburg finds, but “many Russians do buy into the Kremlin’s alternative reality, according to which in Ukraine Russia is fighting Nazis and NATO and fighting to defend Russia.”
It is an eerie window into a culture other than our own in which the person beside you on the tram exists in a separate reality of alternative facts. It is a reminder, and not a comforting one, that in some ways MAGA Republicans, for all their chest-thumping claims to patriotism, are more Russian than American. Some might even agree.
Rosenburg’s conversation about the war in Ukraine with a Russian woman from that other reality could be a Good Liars interview with a MAGA Republican. Here, except for sporadic mass shootings, the war is cultural. Bet you didn’t know the Nazis won World War II. They left Germany and emigrated to the U.S. The government is full of them, says a man outside an event featuring Eric Trump and retired general Mike Flynn.
Ask Flynn, “Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?” and he responds “the Fifth.” Ask a guy wearing a Confederate flag tee shirt if he is pro- or anti-slavery, and he replies, “No comment.”
Ghosts of the past
Rosenberg visits an abandoned Russian base near Berlin. “The Forbidden City” in Wünsdorf, Germany was built by the Nazis and occupied by the Soviets after WWII. Russia once had 800 garrisons and half a million Soviet troops in East Germany. Now the base is a ghost town. Again, eerie. Moscow once believed its presence in Germany was a permanent expression of Russian empire.
I wasn’t around for the USSR's birth (100 years ago today) but I did witness its demise: the collapse of a superpower with an empire stretching from the Pacific to the fringes of western Europe. We visit one place haunted by memories of communism. With @mattgodtv@BBCWillVernonpic.twitter.com/dTWJnXWxDU
Starting in June 2023, every California child under the age of 5 will be able to receive a free book in the mail, every month, thanks to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library expansion to California! 📚
They say this about a lot of people but she truly deserves it: Dolly Parton is a national treasure.
Remember this?
Last year, Ms. Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which worked with the drug maker Moderna to develop one of the first coronavirus vaccines to be authorized in the United States. The federal government eventually invested $1 billion in the creation and testing of the vaccine, but the leader of the research effort, Dr. Mark Denison, said that the singer’s donation had funded its critical early stages.
On Tuesday, Ms. Parton, 75, received a Moderna shot at Vanderbilt Health in Tennessee. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she wrote on Twitter.
Helen Branswell of STAT News, one of the best science writers around, interviewed a whole bunch of scientists and public health experts about what surprised them about the COVID pandemic. It’s fascinating. Some of them were surprised by things like the supply chain breakdown or the eerie quiet of the streets during the early days. With others it was the virus itself. You need to read the whole thing, but I’ve excerpted a few of the findings below:
The biggest surprise, hands down: How the virus has evolved
In the early days of the pandemic, before the new virus had a name, people who had studied coronaviruses offered reassuring predictions about the stability of the virus, which has implications for how often people might be reinfected and how frequently vaccines would need to be updated.
Coronaviruses don’t change very quickly, they aren’t as mutable as, say, influenza viruses, those experts said. In fact, the spike protein on the virus’ exterior, the one that attaches to human cells and triggers infection, cannot change too much without losing its ability to infect, they assured the rest of us.
That was the dogma. Then came the variants: Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron, with its mind-boggling array of mutations. Since it emerged in late 2021, Omicron has splintered into a seemingly endless succession of subvariants, which continue to mutate and evade immunity induced by prior infection and immunization.
Many of the people STAT interviewed cited SARS-CoV-2’s evolution as their biggest surprise of the pandemic. “It’s been wild, in my view,” said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Anthony Fauci, retiring head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also listed it as his number 1 surprise. “What has surprised me most about Covid is the continual evolution of new variants leading to an unprecedented persistence of the pandemic phase over three years,” he said.
Michael Diamond, a viral immunologist at Washington University, scoffed when he recalled the early proclamations about the virus’ inability to mutate much. “At some point we’re going to run out of mutational space. Well, we haven’t run out of that yet, which was surprising to us, I think, that the virus is still flexible enough to be able to accommodate these mutations. And not only do that, but increase transmissibility and increase immune escape concurrently.”
The erroneous prediction was predicated on what, after the fact, was clearly a flawed idea — that the evolutionary rate seen when a virus was moving through a totally naïve population would remain the evolutionary rate when the virus faced the challenge of infecting people who had some vaccine- or infection-acquired immunity, said Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at Rockefeller University.
Bieniasz was surprised by the role immunocompromised people — people who, once they contracted Covid, could not shake the infection for weeks, sometimes months — played in driving evolution of the virus. That phenomenon is believed to be responsible for another of the surprises about SARS-2 evolution. Most viruses evolve in a stepwise fashion known as “drift,” adding change after change to an existing strain. But some of the Covid variants look more like old versions of the virus were hyper mutated, possibly in a persistently infected person. When those viruses started to spread, they replaced the viruses that had been circulating. The Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Omicron variants of concern are examples of this type of evolution, called saltation, Thomas Peacock and colleagues wrote in a preprint article posted in late November.
“The reality is that SARS-CoV-2 had a much greater capacity for adaptation than I expected,” said Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch. “While this fact was exacerbated by slow uptake and delivery of vaccines, the truth is that the sheer amount of virus and replication provide enough replication cycles to … select for mutations that provided fitness and immune evasion advantages.”
Covid vaccines — so many surprises
For quite a few of the people interviewed for this article, the speed with which Covid vaccines were developed was truly unexpected. Ran Balicer, director of Israel’s Clalit Research Institute, encapsulated that view: “Vaccine(s) ready, tested, and launched in under a year.” For others, the surprise was how effective the vaccines were. “I was on the Pfizer DSMB” — the data and safety monitoring board, a group of independent experts who oversee a clinical trial — “and was one of the people that unblinded that study the first time and saw the 95% efficacy. Basically it just brought tears to my eyes,” said Kathryn Edwards, a professor of pediatrics and vice-chair for clinical research at Vanderbilt University.
Still others were stunned at how many vaccine development attempts were successful. Hatchett is now the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an organization whose mission is to spur development of vaccines for diseases that can trigger dangerous epidemics or pandemics, vaccines for which there isn’t a market — until suddenly there is. He thought there would be a Covid vaccine within 12 to 18 months of the start of the pandemic; in fact, the first vaccines were ready in 11 months. But historically, only about 1 in 10 vaccine projects succeeds. Hatchett figured that would be the case here too.
Instead, Covid vaccine after Covid vaccine worked. Old-school inactivated vaccines, the foundation of China’s vaccination effort. New messenger RNA vaccines like Pfizer’s and Moderna’s. Recombinant protein vaccines like the one made by Novavax. Viral-vectored vaccines, like the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson jabs. True, there were a few failures, but far fewer than anyone anticipated. Hatchett puts it down to investments in vaccinology.
Not all the vaccine surprises were positive
For all the wondrous surprises related to the vaccines, some were disappointing.
They have been potent protectors against the worst of Covid, cutting hospitalizations and deaths dramatically. But protection against infection declines rapidly over a course of a few months — at least with the mRNA vaccines. “Going from 95% to negligible in terms of transmission in the time window in which that has occurred — that’s pretty dramatic,” said Bieniasz, the Rockefeller University virologist.
Vaccine hesitancy and rejection has been a growing problem for years, but before the pandemic, the scale of the problem in the United States was still relatively small. The vast majority of parents vaccinated their kids against childhood diseases.
And in the early days of the vaccine rollout, when supplies were tight, people jostled and misrepresented themselves and called in favors to try to get to the front of the line faster. But anti-vax forces mobilized to attack the new vaccines. Rumors flew that they attacked testicles and altered fertility. A surprising level of distrust took hold. As vaccine supplies began to swell, demand began to evaporate.
Messonnier knew all about vaccine hesitancy. But even she was taken aback by how quickly “must have” turned to “meh.”
“I expected people to see vaccines as they did at the end of 2020, as being the thing that was going to save us, the thing that was going to get life back to normal. And that moment when folks felt that way just passed so quickly,” said Messonnier, who is now dean of the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina.
Claire Hannan, too, was surprised by how fleeting the keen-to-get-vaccine moment was. Hannan is the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, which represents leaders of state, local, and territorial immunization programs — the people who oversee the efforts to turn vaccines in vials into vaccinations in arms.
The last couple of years have been extraordinarily busy for Hannan and her members.
“The initial surge in demand and the craziness and the logistics and all of the challenges and the lack of funding and lack of staffing — expected all of that,” she said. “It was what came after that that surprised me.’’
What came after wasn’t a surprise to those of us who follow politics. We knew that half the country had signed on to a cult and that the cult leader was a self-serving con man. Still, I suppose there was some hope that people would sober up one the morgues filled up.
They didn’t:
The susceptibility of the public to charlatans
First it was a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine. Then it was ivermectin, a drug used to eliminate parasitic worms. Heavenly silver. Bleach. Ultraviolet light. Urine therapy. The list goes on.
The Covid pandemic has been a field day for quacks and crooks. They’ve made a killing.
It is ever thus, some would surely say. But Bieniasz has been stunned by the degree to which a not-small portion of the population has been taken in by hucksters — and by the inability of the scientific community to break that spell.
“The sort of willingness of Joe Public to listen to anybody with a large Twitter following has just shocked and appalled me,” Bieniasz said. He sees this as a consequence of a huge loss of trust in the scientific community.
The reverberations of this loss of trust continue, even though the acute phase of the pandemic appears to be subsiding.
Malia Jones, an assistant professor in community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies vaccine hesitancy and rejection. She spoke to parents this autumn who refused to get their kids vaccinated against flu. The reason? A rumor that the government is bottling Covid vaccine in flu vaccine vials to surreptitiously increase Covid vaccination rates among kids.
“What? Imagine the coordination it would take to pull that off. It’s just impossible,” she sputtered. “And illegal, and a lot of other stuff, too. But also just really implausible. It’s not the way the world works.”
So much for pulling together in a crisis
It turns out that a crisis can further polarize highly polarized nations.
“I think I naively would have predicted that it would have brought everyone together, because in the early days you felt that sense of ‘we’re all in it together,’” said Messonnier. Instead, the country cleaved into the people who were concerned about Covid and keen to reduce its spread and the people who thought the cure — school closures and the like — was substantially worse than the disease.
The fights were vicious, deepening existing divides.
“We had seen fierce arguments in the past about the nature of responses and tensions between business and public health. All of that’s structural. It’s part of the problem. But the extent to which it became associated with political identities was surprising and disappointing,” Hatchett said.
Farrar, the new WHO chief scientist, agreed. “The politicization of public health has surprised me — that wearing a mask became a political statement.”
The politicization and polarization of public health measures has hurt vaccine uptake, said Rupali Limaye, director of behavioral and implementation science at the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University. “It is clear that polarization has led to more extreme beliefs and has hampered our ability to speak with those that may have differing views,” she said. “My hope is that we can dial down the politicization through building back trust in health institutions, as we will need to navigate this for disease control in the future.”
There’s a lot more at the link including some pretty severe criticisms of the public health apparatus, the government agencies and scientists themselves. We have to hope that these lessons won’t be forgotten before the inevitable next pandemic.
Update: Just as an aside, among the January 6th transcripts that were released today is this outrageous excerpt about Jared Kushner:
That isn’t a surprise. He is a sociopath which raises the question: what lessons have we learned about electing sociopaths to high office?
Paul Krugman addresses one of the big questions I think a lot of us have had over the past few weeks. If that guy is running twitter isn’t that guy also running Tesla? How much of his reputation is hype?
If you’re one of those people who bought Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency near its peak last fall, you’ve lost a lot of money. Is it any consolation to know that you would have lost a similar amount if you had bought Tesla stock instead?
OK, probably not. Still, Tesla stock’s plunge is an opportunity to talk about what makes businesses successful in the information age. And in the end, Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think.
It’s natural to attribute Tesla’s recent decline — which is, to be sure, part of a general fall in tech stocks, but an exceptionally steep example — to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed. Indeed, given what we’ve seen of Musk’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust him to feed my cat, let alone run a major corporation. Furthermore, Tesla sales have surely depended at least in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy. Who, aside from MAGA types who probably wouldn’t have bought Teslas anyway, sees him that way now?
On the other hand, as someone who has spent much of his professional life in academia, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of people who are genuinely brilliant in some areas but utter fools in other domains. For all I know, Musk is or was a highly effective leader at Tesla and SpaceX.
Even if that’s the case, though, it’s hard to explain the huge valuation the market put on Tesla before the drop, or even its current value. After all, to be that valuable, Tesla would have to generate huge profits not just for a few years but in a way that could be expected to continue for many years to come.
Now, some technology companies have indeed been long-term moneymaking machines. Apple and Microsoft still top the list of the most profitable U.S. corporations some four decades after the rise of personal computers.
But we more or less understand the durability of the dominance of Apple and Microsoft, and it’s hard to see how Tesla could ever achieve something similar, no matter how brilliant its leadership. Both Apple and Microsoft benefit from strong network externalities — loosely speaking, everyone uses their products because everyone else uses their products.
In the case of Microsoft, the traditional story has been that businesses continued to buy the company’s software, even when it was panned by many people in the tech world, because it was what they were already set up to use: Products like Word and Excel may not have been great, but everyone within a given company and in others it did business with was set up to use them, had I.T. departments that knew how to deal with them and so on. These days, Microsoft has a better reputation than it used to, but as far as I can tell, its market strength still reflects comfort and corporate habit rather than a perception of excellence.
Apple’s story is different in the details — more about individual users than institutions, more about physical products than about software alone. And Apple was widely considered cool, which I don’t think Microsoft ever was. But at an economic level it’s similar. I can attest from experience that once you’re in the iPhone/iPad/MacBook ecosystem, you won’t give up on its convenience unless offered something a lot better.
Similar stories can be told about a few other companies, such as Amazon, with its distribution infrastructure.
The question is: Where are the powerful network externalities in the electric vehicle business?
Electric cars may well be the future of personal transportation. In fact, they had better be, since electrification of everything, powered by renewable energy, is the only plausible way to avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s hard to see what would give Tesla a long-term lock on the electric vehicle business.
I’m not talking about how great Teslas are or aren’t right now; I’m not a car enthusiast (I should have one of those bumper stickers that say, “My other car is also junk”), so I can’t judge. But the lesson from Apple and Microsoft is that to be extremely profitable in the long run a tech company needs to establish a market position that holds up even when the time comes, as it always does, that people aren’t all that excited about its products.
So what would make that happen for Tesla? You could imagine a world in which dedicated Tesla hookups were the only widely available charging stations, or in which Teslas were the only electric cars mechanics knew how to fix. But with major auto manufacturers moving into the electric vehicle business, the possibility of such a world has already vanished. In fact, I’d argue that the Inflation Reduction Act, with its strong incentives for electrification, will actually hurt Tesla. Why? Because it will quickly make electric cars so common that Teslas no longer seem special.
In short, electric vehicle production just doesn’t look like a network externality business. Actually, you know what does? Twitter, a platform many of us still use because so many other people use it. But Twitter usage is apparently hard to monetize, not to mention the fact that Musk appears set on finding out just how much degradation of the user experience it will take to break its network externalities and drive away the clientele.
Which brings us back to the question of why Tesla was ever worth so much. The answer, as best as I can tell, is that investors fell in love with a story line about a brilliant, cool innovator, despite the absence of a good argument about how this guy, even if he really was who he appeared to be, could found a long-lived money machine.
And as I said, there’s a parallel here with Bitcoin. Despite years of effort, nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering. But prices nonetheless soared on the hype, and are still being sustained by a hard-core group of true believers. Something similar surely happened with Tesla, even though the company does actually make useful things.
I guess we’ll eventually see what happens. But I definitely won’t trust Elon Musk with my cat.
I definitely wouldn’t trust that freak with my cat. And frankly, I’m concerned about trusting myself in one of his cars. I know people who love them and like Krugman, I’m not a car enthusiast, so I can’t really judge. But there is something so wrong with Musk, the flighty man-child so closely associated with the brand, that it’s hard not to suspect that the product is tainted.
I’m always suspicious of these personality cults, no matter whether it’s business, politics or entertainment. That’s just my temperament. But there are very few who ever live up to the hype and I think Musk may be one of the best examples.
Ronna McDaniel says the most important question for Republicans to get to the bottom of in the new year is Hunter Biden's laptop pic.twitter.com/KOoKMHsEwZ
Oh, and also they need to get to the bottom of the pandemic origins and figure out why kids were kept out of schools.
This is just a friendly reminder of the circus that’s raising its tent in Washington DC next week.
RICH EDSON, FOX NEWS: Congressman, there is a speakership race coming up in less than a week. Who is going to be Speaker?
REP. ANDY BIGGS: We will have to have that vote on January 3. Right now, nobody has 218 votes which is the magic number. I don’t we are going to see that until January 3. Maybe it will take a few ballots to shake that out.
EDSON: Is there a candidate you would support or that you want or think should be Speaker of the House?
BIGGS: Of course, I’m running. But there are some good people in our conference. I don’t want to put a name. I don’t want to put a target on their back, but there are several people that are very capable, actually more than just a few capable of being Speaker of the House. I think we will get a consensus candidate, and we will get it in fairly short order and move on.
EDSON: There is a congressman, David Valadao, who spoke about this, a colleague of yours and this is what he had to say about the speakership race.
EDSON: The argument goes that without backing leader McCarthy for Speaker and you are delaying the business of House Republicans, delaying oversight and delaying legislation. What about that?
BIGGS: Well, I think that’s not true and not accurate. Right now we have already seen the appointment of committee chairmen. We have legislation getting ready to go. We normally don’t even begin intense committee hearings and moving forward until late January. The committees could be populated today.
Mr. McCarthy has chosen not to do it. Why? Because he wants the leverage to try to get people to vote for him based on committee assignments. I don’t believe any of that is accurate.
I think David, I like David and I get it he has the district over from McCarthy. I understand. He will support him all the way. But there are other people should be there. When people start talking about those things, they forget the oeuvre, the body of work of Mr. McCarthy.
EDSON: Is there any scenario that you would ever vote for Leader McCarthy on any ballot, any scenario where he gets your vote?
BIGGS: I don’t think so. I do not think so. And here’s why. He’s got a body of work. You go back to ’17 and ’18. Look at the, look at why we had Democrats voting for the Republican budgets. Because the Republicans didn’t want those budgets, but the floor Leader, Mr. McCarthy, cut those deals with the Democrats. President Trump signed those budgets, but he said they were the worst budgets ever, and he was probably right, until the later budgets that we’ve seen from the Democrats.
I’m actually impressed that Biggs used the word ouevre on Fox News.
As someone crazy once said, “it will be wild!” starting with the speaker’s race itself.
