Im-Politic: Will the Pandemic’s Real Lessons Ever Be Learned?

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, facemasks, Great Barrington Declaration, Im-Politic, lockdowns, Mainstream Media, mandates, natural immunity, The New York Times, vaccines

Give The New York Times some credit here. On the one hand, its big, graphics-rich feature marking the grim news that about a million Americans have been killed by the CCP Virus has pinpointed a highly specific group of culprits for this towering toll, and an equally specific group of measures that could have held it way down (although it’s never indicated by how much).

Among the worst: “elected officials who played down the threat posed by the coronavirus and resisted safety measures” and “lower vaccination and booster rates than other rich countries, partly the result of widespread mistrust and resistance fanned by right-wing media and politicians.”

So clearly, the authors insist, mask-wearing and lockdowns and social distancing should have been imposed much faster and more widely (without stating for how long), and more vaccinations required.

On the other hand, the reader is presented with abundant evidence that the benefits of such measures might have been limited – which is especially striking since not even a hint is provided that such steps might have inflicted considerable damage in their own right – including from other threats to public health that have been neglected.

Most strikingly, consistent with its observation that “The virus did not claim lives evenly, or randomly.” the piece reminds that in fact, the worst damage was remarkably concentrated in a single group. Specifically, “Three quarters of those who have died of Covid have been 65 or older.” Moreover, of that cohort, a third were 85 and over.

And then there was the related nursing homes disaster. According to the Times piece, a fifth of the roughly million CCP Virus-induced deaths in America occurred among residents and staff of these facilities.

Why longer and more sweeping lockdowns and the like would have reduced the virus’ damage to the nation as a whole, considering all the economic, educational, and health harm they produced for the vast majority of Americans who were far less vulnerable, is never explained.

The article’s case for vaccine mandates is similarly muddled. It repeats the widespread claims that most of those who died from the virus after vaccines became widely available were unvaxxed, and that “vaccinated people have had a much lower death rate — unvaccinated people have been at least nine times as likely to die since April 2021 [when the eligibility for the doses became universally available].”

At the same time, readers learn that:

>“at least 50,000 vaccinated people, many of them older or without booster shots, were among the deaths reported since late April 2021….”; and that

>”People 80 and older who had gotten shots were almost twice as likely to die at the height of the Omicron wave as those in their 50s or early 60s who had not, according to C.D.C. [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data.”

Further, the article makes clear that, even forgetting about the decisive role played by age, claims about vaccine effectiveness are substantially exaggerated. Despite presenting the common contention that “unvaccinated people have been at least nine times as likely to die since April 2021,” the chart presented to support this point shows that this ratio has held for only part of the period duing which vaccines have become widely available. The chart also that the gap has almost disappeared today.

In addition, the piece reports that “The C.D.C. has received data on deaths by vaccination status from only about half of the states….” As the authors explain, this data shortage makes it “impossible to know exactly how many vaccinated people are among the million who have died.”

Conversely, this data shortage – along with thoroughgoing ignorance about how many Americans have enjoyed natural immunity from the virus and therefore passed up the jabs, and how many who caught Covid asymptomatically and made similar decisions – also prevents figuring out what share of unvaccinated Americans died of the virus.

But because both numbers are doubtless both enormous, this percentage is doubtless much smaller than commonly supposed.  The Times authors (and their editors, who it should always be remembered greenlight every article’s journalistic methodology) might have adjusted their judgements, and recognized that alternative pandemic mitigation approaches — including those that took into account the difficult tradeoffs that needed to be made — have long been recommended, had they bothered to consult any of the impressively credentialed specialists who have been making these points. 

Yet they seemed as determined to ignore or marginalize their views as the official U.S. medical establishment has been.  As long as both America’s healthcare leaders and its Mainstream Media so doggedly oppose full debate on the real lessons taught by the pandemic, it’s hard to imagine that the nation will be prepared for the (inevitable) arrival of the next deadly pathogen. 

Glad I Didn’t Say That! What a Difference Nine Months Makes

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Biden, David Brooks, Democrats, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Mainstream Media, pundits, The New York Times

“The Biden Approach is Working””

– Headline on David Brooks’ New York Times column, August 5, 2021

“Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn — Fast”

– Headline on David Brooks’ New York Times column, April 28, 2022

 

(Sources: “The Biden Approach is Working,” by David Brooks, The New York Times, August 5, 2021, Opinion | The Biden Approach Is Working – The New York Times (nytimes.com) and “Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn – Fast,” by David Brooks, ibid., April 28, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/opinion/seven-lessons-democrats-need-to-learn-fast.html)   

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How Strongly Does Most of the World Really “Stand with Ukraine”?

Tags

General Assembly, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, The New York Times, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, United Nations, Vladimir Putin

The New York Times deserves a lot of credit for running this article yesterday, which reported that, as the headline observed, “In Some Parts of the World, the War in Ukraine Seems Justified.” At the same time, there’s strong evidence that “some” greatly understates the case – to the point that it’s entirely unclear that the piece’s supposedly context-providing claim that “Most of the world has loudly and unequivocally condemned [Vladimir] Putin for sparking a war with Ukraine” holds much water.

If you’re skeptical, just look at the United Nations General Assembly vote condemning the Russian dictator’s invasion and demanding its immediate end and the total, unconditional withdrawal of Moscow’s forces from all of Ukraine’s “internationally recognized borders.”

Yes, the resolution voted on was sponsored by 90 of the 193 UN members and backed by 141 – more than the two-thirds required for adoption. And yes, only Russia and four other equally reprehensible dictatorships (including satellite state Belarus and client state Syria) voted “No.”

But 35 countries abstained and 14 UN members didn’t vote at all. And the abstaining countries represented a huge share of the world’s estimated population of nearly eight billion. Between China and India alone, we’re talking more than 35 percent of the global total. (These and the population figures below come from the reliable Worldometers.info website.) 

And you can add to these abstainers’ ranks Pakistan (221 million), Bangladesh (167 million), Vietnam (97 million), Iran (84 million), South Africa (59 million), Uganda (45 million), Sudan and Algeria (44 million each). The non-voters, meanwhile, included Ethiopia (115 million).

Do the math, and these countries’ populations sum to just under 3.7 billion. That’s nearly 47 percent of the global total – and it doesn’t even include Russia’s 146 million people

No one’s saying that most of these countries’ governments are democracies that represent the popular will (although India’s clearly is). Indeed, some of their people have publicly protested Russia’s aggression. (See, e.g., here and here.)

But nothing indicates that these demonstrators mirror majority opinion in these countries or even close, for whatever reason – ranging from the kind of sympathy for Russia reported in the Times piece to ignorance or apathy. That is, maybe big shares of these populations haven’t heard about the war to begin with, or if they have, pay little attention to its developments because they’re too preoccupied with struggling to eak out a living.   

By the same token, nothing indicates that Putin’s war enjoys broad, much less deep, support in these countries, let alone in any others, either. And it’s surely significant that the countries that have condemned the invasion account for a strong majority of the global economy. That’s even the case for the smaller group of countries that have imposed various kinds of sanctions.

The UN votes, however, do make clear that, however tempting and inspiring it is to think that  “most of the world” really does “loudly and unequivocally” Stand with Ukraine, as the Times contends, the reality is a lot more complicated.

Im-Politic: You Bet Sarah Palin Got Shafted in Her NY Times Libel Suit

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Elizabeth Williamson, First Amendment, freedom of the press, Gabrielle Giffords, Im-Politic, James Bennet, Jared Loughner, Jed S. Rakoff, journalism, libel, Mainstream Media, media bias, press freedom, Sarah Palin, The New York Times

The more I read about it, the clearer it is that the outcome of the Sarah Palin libel suit against The New York Times was a complete travesty of justice.

Let’s start at the end. The presiding judge, Jed S. Rakoff – an appointee of former (Democratic) President Bill Clinton’s – who had already thrown out the case once ostensibly on the merits, and who therefore should have never been permitted to handle the retrial – decided to dismiss Palin’s charges a second time while the jury was still deliberating. What was the hurry, Judge?

Worse, the jury sequestration procedures were so slipshod that its members found out about his decision before their work was done. Rakoff said the jurors insisted that their own verdict against Palin wasn’t influenced by this news. Which means we’re supposed to believe that the ruling of the supreme authority figure they were dealing with for the entirety of the trial, whose very robe-clad figure symbolizes impartiality, and one of whose main duties is to instruct them on the legal dos and don’ts of their role, had no effect on their thinking. That’s remotely believable?

Just as serious – though not so unmistakably biased – was Rakoff’s view that there was so little evidence that Times editors acted with malice in producing an editorial that pinned responsibility on Palin for a failed assassination attempt on a Member of Congress that the paper should have been acquitted literally ASAP. And the jury got it just as wrong.

Here are the two paragraphs, from a June, 2017 Times editorial, on which Palin mainly based her case:

“Was this attack [by a shooter on Republican Members of Congress in 2017] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killing six people, including a nine-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and nineteen other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

“Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask for of the right.”

The crucial tests that must be passed by libel charges against a public figure (like Palin) are (1) that the statement in question is false (The Times admitted as much a corrections it ran soon after); and (2), created by the Supreme Court in a 1964 case involving The Times, that the statement was published either with “actual malice” or with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

As should be obvious to anyone knowing standard English, the key portion comes in the first paragraph, which notes the 2011 attack on Rep. Giffords and others, claims that “the link to political incitement is clear” and directly proceeds to recall a map contained in a Palin political ad. The only possible sane interpretation is that the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate’s organization played a role in inciting shooter Loughner. And for good measure, this accusation that Palin’s ad activated Loughner was repeated in the second paragraph.

The allegation about the ad’s effect was not only false, but false on every count. What was depicted under crosshairs in the ad were not pictures of Giffords herself or any other Members of Congress, but their districts on a map of the continental United States. (As shown below, the lawmakers’ names were included under the map.)

And Loughner was so certifiably insane that, as was totally predictable, no evidence has ever emerged that he knew of Palin’s ad. Nor did he have to, as he had become preoccupied with Giffords years earlier. And indeed, as alluded to above, the Times admitted the falsehood in two corrections it ran within a day after the editorial came out.

These corrections have been cited, including by Rakoff, as evidence that the paper was not aiming to smear Palin, but simply committed an innocent mistake. But does he really believe that such brief ex post facto statements, inserted at the end of the new version, are seen by nearly as many readers and have nearly the impact of the original?  Moreover, this new version still describes the Palin ad as an example of the dangerous and indeed “lethal” “viciousness” of much American political rhetoric nowadays – before abruptly somersaulting and tacking on the qualifier that “in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.”

Rakoff found even more convincing of the Times‘ benign intentions an email sent by editorial page chief James Bennet – who rewrote the commentary and added its most controversial language – to original drafter Elizabeth Williamson once his rewrite was finished (and, as both of them knew, finished very close to the deadline they were needlessly determined to meet, as described below).  In it, Bennet asked her to “Please take a look” at his changes, which he acknowledged – rather apologetically – were substantial. 

As explained by Washington Post media critic Erik Wempel, Rakoff judged that the email established Bennet’s good faith because “No matter what you believe about Bennet or his colleagues, he’d be foolish to ask for Williamson’s review of the draft if he’d been committed to planting damaging falsehoods in it.”

But nothing in Bennet’s message alerted Williamson – who, as made clear above, also believed in a Palin-Gifford shooting connection – to the possibility that he’d exaggerated the Palin angle in any way.  It doesn’t appear that this aspect of the rewrite was even mentioned.  (I haven’t managed to find a copy of the entire message, but am relying on the reproduction contained in the above-linked Columbia Journalism Review article.)  If anything, the last-minute nature and apologetic tone of the message indicate most strongly that Bennet viewed it as a sop to a colleague whose work he found thoroughly unsatisfactory 

Moreover, Williamson’s response shows that the last issue she was thinking about was whether Palin’s role in the nation’s violent politics had been misrepresented. 

For his part, Bennet contends both that he was unaware of previous Times reporting, and that when he wrote about the “clear” “link” between the type of “political incitement” represented by the Palin ad and the Giffords shooting, he never intended to argue that there was a clear link between the two.

Amazingly, when he presided over the first case in 2017, Rakoff simply ignored this transparently feeble attempt – from a highly educated individual who for decades had earned his living and carved out a distinguished career at the very top of his profession through his skill at using words – to argue that the words he set down on paper had nothing to do with the message he wished to convey.

Instead, the judge declared (in his above-linked 2017 ruling) that “What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected. Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.” That is, nothing of legal significance to see here.

But during the retrial, evidence came out undercutting his reading of events. First, as mentioned above, it became apparent that the editorial was a rush job where there was no need to rush. In fact, as recounted here, the morning that news appeared of the 2017 attack on the Congressional Republicans appeared, Times editorial staffers weren’t even sure that any commentary was warranted, much less what it would say.

It’s important to realize here that, unlike their news division counterparts, the editorial page staff was under no competitive pressures from rival news organizations to keep releasing breaking, originally reported material. And especially, as noted above, since editorial page chief Bennet didn’t even receive the first draft of the piece from Williamson until very late in the production day, any responsible publication should have proceeded with caution on such a highly charged topic.

That’s an even stronger point considering that, as even Rakoff has acknowledged,

“Certainly the case law is clear that mere failure to check is not enough to support ‘reckless disregard’ in the context of any libel claim. But … where the assertion is that someone incited murder: That is such a strong statement that even under a reckless disregard standard, it calls for more assiduous checking than would be normally the case.”

And revealingly, despite the ongoing confusion about what focus the editorial should take, Palin was fingered from the beginning as a culprit behind what looked like a national outburst of political violence. As argued in the first draft (cited in the 2017 Rakoff judgement linked above):

“Just as in 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a nine year-old girl, Mr. Hodgkinson’s [the Congressional Republicans’ attacker] rage was nurtured in a vile political climate. Then, it was the progun right being criticized: in the weeks before the shooting Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”

Weirdly, the draft included a hyperlink to a post from ABC News debunking the Palin-Giffords shooting connection. But upon seeing an insinuation that someone – especially a national politician – had incited murder, Bennet didn’t engage in the kind of “more assiduous checking” Rakoff suggested is called for (even when a public figure is involved) when it comes to libel claims revolving around such grave charges. He didn’t make any effort at all. Instead, he decided that itwas much more important to meet the 8 PM deadline for making the following morning’s edition. And in the process, he wound up actually dialing up the anti-Palin rhetoric.

As reported here, in pre-trial testimony, Bennet “cited deadline pressures as he explained that he did not personally research the information about Palin’s political action committee before approving the editorial’s publication. He said he believed the editorial was accurate when it was published.”

But this is the crucial point: Why did he swallow the Palin claim so easily? Because it was Sarah Palin. Someone who, in the milieu in which he spent his entire professional life, was almost uniformly derided as a ditz at best (“I can see Russia from my house!”) and at worst as a demagogue who paved the way for Public Enemy Number One Donald Trump. And if this unmistakably blithe assumption that Palin was of course a hate- and violence-mongerer doesn’t amount to a reckless disregard for the truth, it’s hard to imagine what would,

Fortunately, Rakoff’s legal but bizarro and gratuitous decision to jump the gun on the jury seems likely to increase the odds of a retrial -and perhaps a Palin victory. Unless a U.S. justice system that’s fallen flat on its face in this case gives him yet another chance to allow a news giant to abuse its power.

Following Up: The Latest on the Virus and the Border

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Biden border crisis, Border Crisis, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Following Up, hospitalizations, Immigration, migrants, mortality, Open Borders, public health, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wuhan virus

This past Saturday, I upbraided New York Times editorial writers for claiming that the CCP Virus pandemic had eased enough to justify admitting into the country more illegal aliens who may be carriers and therefore spreaders of the disease. The basis for my criticism was data from the Times itself indicating that the pandemic wasn’t easing any more – and strongly suggesting that the paper’s Open Borders-like immigration policy stances had become extreme enough to rationalize worsening already serious dangers to public health.

Five days later, it’s clear that, although the paper still has a lot to answer for publishing this piece (like its insistence that there was never a compelling public health rationale for putting such virus-related immigration restrictions into effect), my use of the word “indicating” to describe the virus’ status was well chosen. For the latest figures paint an oddly contadictory picture of the pandemic threat.

When I wrote the November 13 post, nearly a week’s worth of statistics on virus deaths showed them on the upswing again after the seven-day averages (7DA) had been falling – often by double-digits percent per day – since late-September. But on November 9, they began rising again, and two days later the figure was again approaching double digits: 9.72 percent. By Friday, the 12^th, however, they’d started retreating again, and yesterday were down an encouraging 12.74 percent. So by that metric (which isn’t perfect), the situation is looking reasonably good. (My source, as usual, is The Washington Post‘s very user-friendly virus tracking feature.)

The same, however, can’t be said for virus-related hospitalization rates. These numbers aren’t pefect, either (see here for a good explanation why), but they’re probably the best available for gauging progress against the virus. Moreover, they tend to prefigure death rates (because hospitalized patients don’t die right away). But although they started trending down according to the 7DA numbers starting on September 6, that decline began slowing in late October, and the 7DA for daily new hospitalizations went back into growth territory last Friday. By this metric, therefore, a return of tough virus times may lie ahead. So does the return of winter.

This impressive case for pessimism doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my opposition to indiscriminate anti-CCP Virus policies like current mask and vaccine mandates, let alone sweeping shutdowns and lockdowns. But it also reenforces the case for preventing the situation facing Americans from becoming worse still – including by protecting the country from illegal migrants whose health status will always be at best uncertain (because of weak public health and record-keeping systems in most sending countries). That is, unless, like The New York Times, you think American and their health should come last when making immigration policy.

Im-Politic: More Americans-Last Immigration Tripe from The New York Times

Tags

CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, Immigration, public health, The New York Times, Title 42, Wuhan virus

It looks – embarassingly – like New York Times editorial writers don’t bother to look at the newspaper’s comprehensive vaccine tracker feature. Or at least they didn’t bother when preparing today’s editorial calling for an end to a regulation called Title 42, “an emergency public health order that allows the government to turn away migrants at the nation’s borders during a pandemic.”

According to the edit, a big part of the reason is that “the Covid-19 pandemic is receding.”

But flip to the paper’s “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count” section, and you see that one of the most reliable (though far from perfect) indicators of the pandemic’s virulence – hospitalizations – are no longer declining as steeply as they had been starting in early September. And the daily death count is showing signs of stabilizing after falling rapidly starting in mid-September.

Moreover, the numbers are likely to keep worsening in the coming weeks because winter is coming, and because the CCP Virus in all its variants is seasonal – like many other infectious diseases. In other words, now that the weather is getting colder, some kind of new wave seems sure to arrive.

Incidentally, the edit’s other stated prime rationale for ending Title 42 is just completely bonkers. The Times writes of evidence that’s recently surfaced of an official for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly making clear that “there was little public health rationale for instituting the policy, since the virus was already spreading in the United States by the time the Title 42 order was signed” in March, 2020 under the Trump administration.

In other words, a then-little known and therefore greatly feared disease was metastasizing among the American population, and it was – xenophobic? racist? choose your own disparaging adjective? – to minimize the odds that infected foreigners would make the problem even worse?

And in fact, this last argument illustrates the most fundamental problem with the editorial – and the paper’s overall position on immigration. Times‘ ownership obviously favors an Open Borders-like policy, which is of course perfectly fine and its inalienable right. What’s neither is its unwillingness to show some intellectual honesty and openly say so.

Im-Politic: Why Delta Looks Like a Wave (in the Best Sense)

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, health, Im-Politic, lockdowns, pandemic, public health, The New York Times, vaccination, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, vaccines, Washington Post, Wuhan virus

I hate to break up the CCP Virus panic party that’s been held lately due to the surge of the Delta variant in recent weeks.

Actually, as known by RealityChek readers, I don’t hate to break it up, since I’ve been writing that it doesn’t portend the end of days, or anything close – much less a development serious enough to justify a return to economic and behavioral curbs in the United States. But even I was surprised to see how strongly the U.S. data support my confidence that Delta’s a wave in the most encouraging sense: It’s something that’s going to come down about as fast as it went up, both nation-wide and state-wide. Moreover, contrary to the almost universal claims, differences in vaccination rates don’t seem to have much to do with these trends.

These conclusions are based on data showing recent changes in hospitalization rates in states that have seem to have been hardest hit by the overall national increase in recorded virus cases since late June. As I’ve pointed out, case numbers are a deeply flawed measure of the virus’ impact on the nation, largely because so many infections are asymptomatic or very mild. Therefore, such victims typically don’t bother to report them. By the same token, however, their prevalence indicates that the pandemic’s dangers to Americans generally speaking are limited.

Hospitalization rates suffer major flaws, too – mainly because of sloppy definitional practices – but they’re better than case numbers. And what the numbers make clear is that in handful of states widely described as the Delta and overall new wave epicenters (see, e.g., here and here), the hospitalization curve is bending down big time. That is, the weekly numbers of new hospitalizations have slowed dramatically.

Here are the actual figures, with the percentage changes new hospitalizations over the last two weeks shown on the left side (and based on The New York Times‘ interactive CCP Virus tracker) and the percentage changes over the last week shown on the right side (and based on the Washington Post‘s tracker). I needed to use two sources here because I couldn’t find a single source that presented all this information in one place.

U.S.:                      +90 percent            +34 percent

Florida:                +111 percent            +17 percent

Texas:                  +102 percent            +19 percent

Lousiana:             +136 percent            +32 percent

Arkansas:               +45 percent              +4 percent

Missouri:                +27 percent              +5 percent

Mississippi:          +166 percent            +26 percent

In addition, as well known by now, the full vaccination rates in all of these states have lagged the national average of about 50 percent as of today.

Florida:      49.6 percent

Texas:        44.5 percent

Lousiana:   37.6 percent

Arkansas:   37.6 percent

Missouri:    42.1 percent

More evidence of the relatively modest role played by the vaccines in slowing hospitalization rates can be seen in the below table presenting, as above, the changes in weekly hospitalizations over the last two weeks and over the last week for the ten states with the highest full vaccination rates (shown in parentheses).

                                   over the last two weeks            over last week

US (50.1 percent):              +90 percent                       +34 percent

Vermont (67.9 percent):    +577 percent                     +260 percent

Mass. (64.4 percent):          +78 percent                       +25 percent

Maine (64.2 percent):         +29 percent                          -8 percent

Connect. (63.9 percent):     +90 percent                       +14 percent

R.I. (62.1 percent):               -29 percent                      +89 percent

Maryland (59.5 percent):     +77 percent                      +23 percent

N.J. (59.0 percent):              +60 percent                      +14 percent

N.H. (58.6 percent):             +45 percent                     +13 percent

Wash. (58.6 percent):           +60 percent                     +21 percent

N.M. (57.8 percent):            +89 percent                     +23 percent

The first observation to be made is that nation-wide, the increase in hospitalizations has slowed significantly – for which everyone should be thankful. The second point worth noting is that the two week changes for the high- and low-vax states don’t differ to any great extent, though both display significant variation. And the third point I’d emphasize is that the slowdowns mostly have been much faster in the low-vax states. So since we’re examining all these states during the same timeframes, it’s difficult to understand the insistence that vaccination is so vital to stopping the spread. (Incidentally, I’d ignore the Vermont data, since the absolute numbers are so small.)

The only other explanation I can think of is that the high-vax states tend to be states that are densely populated, whereas the low-vax states are much less so. But logically, that would seem to argue most strongly for more energetic vaccine efforts to be made where people are most crowded together, not for villifying the vaccination laggard states (especially when, as in the cases of Florida and Texas, they’re not trailing by that much).

And nothing apparent about the Delta variant so far changes what’s been the most sensible formula for contending with the CCP Virus since the pandemic’s first (understandably) panicky months of 2020:  Don’t treat it like the nation’s only health problem, much less its only problem; don’t ignore its wave-like dynamics or its highly differentiated health effects; therefore keep social and economic life as normal as possible, and focus protective efforts (including vaccines) on the highly vulnerable.      

Im-Politic: The Latest Off-Base CCP Virus Narrative

Tags

Biden, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, Im-Politic, The New York Times, vaccines, Washington Post, Wuhan virus

There’s no doubt that a new CCP Virus narrative is quickly becoming established in the United States, and it was succinctly expressed by Predident Biden last month:

“[T]he data is clear: If you are unvaccinated, you’re at risk of getting seriously ill or dying or spreading it. People getting seriously ill and being hospitalized due to COVID-19 are those who have not been fully vaccinated. The new variant will leave unvaccinated people even more vulnerable than they are a month ago — over a month ago.

“This is a serious concern, especially because of what experts are calling the…the ‘Delta’ variant. It’s a variant that is more easily transmissible, potentially deadlier, and particularly dangerous for young people.

“But the good news is, we have the solution.The science and the data are clear: The best way to protect yourself against these variants are to get fully vaccinated.”

And earlier this week, the nation’s supposed newspaper of record, The New York Times, dutifully presented this analysis as the kind of information that’s factual and uncontroversial enough (among anyone but fanatics and troglodytes) to be used as routine background material:

“While nationwide cases and hospitalization numbers remain relatively low, more local hot spots are emerging and the national trends are moving in the wrong direction, fueled by the spread of the more contagious Delta variant. Vaccines are effective against the variant. Counties that voted for Mr. Biden average higher vaccination levels than those that voted for former President Donald J. Trump. Conservatives tend to decline vaccination far more often than Democrats.”

And practically in lock step, today’s Washington Post tells us, “Federal health officials sounded an alarm Friday about a surge in U.S. coronavirus infections fueled by the twin threats posed by the highly transmissible delta variant and a stagnation in efforts to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.”

It’s now nearly a month after the Biden remarks, though, and the only reasonable conclusion to reach is “Not so fast.” It is indeed clear so far that the vaccines available to Americans work against Delta. It’s also clear that the new variant is extremely contagious. It’s anything but clear, though, that its rapid spread justifies even a doubling down on lagging national vaccination efforts, much less the kind of shaming campaign against vaccine hesitancy and related “misinformation” behind which the Biden administration is marshaling the power of the federal government.

The main reasons? First, contrary to the Biden claims about Delta’s dangers, the U.S. numbers show no sign of unusual lethality or other forms of severity. Second, although Delta has quickly become the dominant form of new infection, the relationship between its appearance and vaccination rates looks awfully weak.

Regarding Delta’s characteristics, evidence of its high transmissibility can be seen in the rising numbers of U.S. virus cases. Since the President spoke out last month, the seven-day average of reported infections is up by just over 139 percent as of yesterday. (I’m using the Washington Post’s virus tracking feature as my source unless otherwise indicated.)

But not to minimize the risks to certain segments of the population (the elderly, the obese, those with other underlying health problems), when it comes to healthy non-senior Americans generally, this statistic per se means almost nothing.

After all, it’s long been known that one of the most vexing properties of the virus is its asymptomatic spread. That is, huge numbers of Americans have been infected and simply didn’t know it because they never detected any effects. Many others doubtless had symptoms so mild that they didn’t bother reporting them.

In this vein, it’s more than a little interesting that former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb (no virus minimizer or vaccine skeptic) just told CNBC that “he believes the U.S. is significantly undercounting the number of Covid delta infections, making it difficult to know whether the highly transmissible strain is causing higher-than-expected hospitalization and death rates.”

Why the undercount? Because “people who are vaccinated, who might develop some mild symptoms or might develop a breakthrough case, by and large are not going out and getting tested. If you’ve been vaccinated and you develop a mild cold right now, you don’t think you have Covid.” Wouldn’t the same hold for the un-vaccinated, whether they have natural immunity or not?

That’s surely why even though since the Biden remarks, while total CCP Virus infections have more than doubled, reported virus-related deaths are actually down (by nearly six percent according to that seven-day average measure). Deaths are indeed a lagging indicator (because the disease doesn’t reach mortality level right away), and there’s evidence that in “some cases,” “Long-Haul COVID” can kill (and sicken) for months after the initial infection.

But if the Delta variant was nearly as lethal as it is virulent, since it’s accounted for a skyrocketing – and now the biggest – share of total national infections, you wouldn’t expect the national death rate to be falling for the past month.

Nor do the national rates of hospitalization and intensive-care unit (ICU) bed use  signal that Delta will overwhelm the healthcare system (the fear that originally spurred the lockdown-/shutdown-/social distancing-/mask-heavy CCP Virus response throughout the country) unless vaccination rates surge. Indeed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between the week of the Biden remarks and the week ending July 10, hospitalizations, new weekly hospitalizations fell, too – from 597 to 523.

Meanwhile, the feebleness of the link between vaccination rates and the Delta variant’s proliferation comes through from an examination of state-specific data.

Below is a list of the states whose hospitalization rate increases over the last week (in descending order, through yesterday) are above that national average of 25 percent, with their specific rates on the left and their (full) vaccination rates on the right:

Alaska:                 +114%            44.7%

Kansas:                   +61%           42.8%

Mississippi:            +50%            33.6%

Louisiana:               +50%            36.0%

Idaho:                      +48%           36.8%

Connecticut:            +47%           62.0%

Arkansas:                +44%           35.1%

Oklahoma:              +42%           39.3%

Florida:                   +42%           47.3%

Texas:                     +39%           42.6%

Nebraska:               +38%           48.5%

Alabama:                +35%           33.6%

Georgia:                  +32%          37.5%

California:              +30%           51.4%

Arizona:                 +30%           44.3%

Tennessee:             +27%            38.2%

Nevada:                 +25%             43.1%

Now keep in mind that the national average full vaccination rate for the country was 48.3 percent, and several big anomalies should stick out immediately, beginning with Alaska. Its hospitalizations apparently soared, yet its vaccination rate was pretty close to the national average. How can that be, if vaccination is so crucial to slowing or stopping the spread of any of the variants?

Of course, with Alaska, the absolute numbers are very small, so any time they change, big percentage changes tend to result. But a very similar pattern also holds for much more populous states like Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Arizona, and a slightly less similar pattern holds for Nevada. As for Florida, moreover, its infections have been growing at the same rate as Oklahoma’s, but its vaccination rate is a good deal higher.

And then there’s Nebraska. Its hospitalization has risen strongly, but its vaccination rates is actually above the national average. Conversely, Connecticut’s vaccination rate is way above the national average, but hospitalizations are increasing robustly anyway.

So that’s eight states out of the sixteen with above-average infection growth (eight if you count Oklahoma) where the narrative doesn’t hold up well.

But maybe the narrative’s relationship between infection growth and vaccination rates is stronger for states where virus spread has been relatively slow – i.e., below the national average? Here are the states with the best infection numbers, from the gold standard to the merely good. Again, infection change rates are on the left and vaccination rates on the right:

North Dakota:            -18%        39.5%

Rhode Island:             -15%        60.2%

Minnesota:                  -14%       52.9%

Maryland:                   -12%       57.5%

Pennsylvania:             -11%       51.0%

West Virginia:            -11%       38.8%

South Dakota:             -7%        46.2%

Illinois                         -3%        47.4%

Maine:                         -2%        62.7%

Virginia:                      -1%        53.2%

Iowa:                            -1%       48.8%

Ohio:                           +2%       45.6%

Washington:                +2%        56.3%

New Jersey:                +2%        56.7%

Michigan:                   +2%        48.1%

New York:                  +3%        55.7%

Indiana:                      +3%        44.3%

Wisconsin:                 +4%        50.9%

Oregon:                    +11%        54.9%

D.C.:                        +12%         53.7%

Delaware:                +16%         51.4%

Colorado:                 +12%        53.3%

Montana:                 +17%         43.6%

Wyoming:                +18%        35.9%

North Carolina:        +18%        42.8%

New Mexico:           +18%        55.2%

Hawaii:                     +19%       52.8%

Kentucky:                 +21%       44.6%

Missouri:                  +22%        40.0%

Utah:                         +22%       43.6%

New Hampshire:      +22%       57.5%

South Carolina:        +23%        39.7%

Again, as should be obvious, the relationship between virus prevalence and vaccination rates is far from obvious. In fact, here again, the state at the top of the list seems to undermine the narrative most thoroughly. North Dakota’s vaccination rate is one of the country’s worst, yet its infection record is the very best on a percentage basis.

Of course, North Dakota’s population is so small that, as with Alaska, changes in absolute numbers can produce big percentage swings. The same goes for the results for West Virginia and South Dakota. But Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan boast big populations, and despite subpar vaccination rates, have seen CCP Virus case numbers fall a bit and rise a bit, respectively. The situation in somewhat less populous Indiana looks like theirs, too. Maybe there’s something about the Big Ten?

At the other end of this spectrum, New Mexico, Hawaii, and New Hampshire have excellent vaccination rates, but lousy virus spread numbers.

And here are some strange coincidences. South Carolina and North Dakota have nearly identical, and very low, vaccination rates. But in the former, CCP Virus cases are up 23 percent on week whereas they’re down by 18 percent in the latter. Conversely, New Hampshire and Maryland both have very high vaccination rates, but infections are up 22 percent in the former and down 12 percent in the latter over the last week. And although North Carolina and New Mexico have seen weekly cases rise at identical 18 percent rates, their vaccination rates are more than twelve and a half percentage points apart.

As I’ve written previously, when comparing the virus story in different states, it’s important to keep in mind how different population structures and different weather patterns can lead to very different results regardless of the policy choices they’ve made. That’s why, for example, I didn’t call attention to the virtually identical weekly case growth rates of Idaho and Connecticut (48 percent and 47 percent, respectively) and their dramatically different vaccination rates (36.8 percent and 62 percent, respectively). Two less alike states you couldn’t even create out of whole cloth.

Of course I can’t find it in my too-often chaotic personal library, but in David Halberstam’s masterpiece on the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, I recall the author writing of Walt W. Rostow – one of the hubristic crew of Ivy League academics who became leading architects of this disaster – that he was constantly seeing connections between trends and events where none existed. I strongly suspect that history will judge purveyors of the latest, Delta-centric CCP Virus narrative just as harshly. 

Im-Politic: New York City Shows How Not to Fight Crime

Tags

African Americans, cities, crime, Im-Politic, inner cities, New York City, progressives, The New York Times, urban poverty

I gotta tell ya – nearly a week days later, I’m completely gobsmacked by the following paragraph in a June 30 New York Times article on New York City’s newly approved budget:

“To address a rise in shootings and homicides that have plagued the city since the pandemic, the city will spend $24 million to provide job training and support services to 1,000 people who are most at risk of participating in or being a victim of violence in neighborhoods including Brownsville, Brooklyn; South Jamaica, Queens; and Mott Haven in the Bronx.”

Granted, the spending barely moves the needle in the $98.7 billion plan for municipal outlays. But assuming the description is accurate, it’s difficult to imagine a program so deeply, and indeed tragicomically, weird in so many ways – not to mention one that so strongly reenforces doubt that the kinds of liberals and progressives who run cities like New York have a clue how to deal with crime. If your imagination is failing you on this score, ask yourself:

>The city is going to identify residents “who are most at risk of participating in…violence” in these crime-ridden precincts? Based on what? If the main or a major criterion concerns prior criminal records, including the commission of violent acts, what’s the rationale for putting any of these individuals ahead of anyone who’s “at risk of…being a victim of violence”? Like it’ll be tough to find 1,000 of these?

>If prior records aren’t being used, or prioritized, what other considerations will help decide who’s “most at risk of participating in…violence”? Are city officials going to seek out youngish African American and Hispanic men? That sounds like endorsing harmful racial stereotypes to me. Will they poll these or other residents and ask which ones are considering “participating in…violence”? And if they do, what happens to those respondents who raise their hands but aren’t selected? Do they get profiled by the police? Moreover, doesn’t that clear risk mean that few if any criminals-to-be are likely to come forward to begin with?

>As suggested above, the city is spotlighting these neighborhoods because crime is so widespread. So in principle, all adult residents are seriously at risk of “being a victim of violence.” But common sense indicates that the elderly and/or are likeliest to be targeted by thugs. Make that a double, lots of evidence indicates, for elderly Asian-Americans. Are many of them going to be channeled into job training programs?

>More fundamentally, helping the genuinely disadvantaged deserves applause. But when it comes to reducing violent crime, what’s the point of providing job training to its likely victims? They’re – obviously – not the ones prone to pulling triggers.

Unless maybe the assumption is that the populations of violent criminals and likely victims of violent crime overlap a lot (say, because gang members could easily fall into both categories)? But if so, to a great extent we’re back to the formidable-at-best challenge of reliably identifying likely violent criminals.

The city could have avoided all these questions – and the potentially fatal problems they spotlight – by simply announcing that the $24 million would be spent on creating more jobs and economic opportunity overall, and/or on improving education and other social services in crime-ridden neighborhoods. It could have even added that teenagers and young adults will be the focus – to increase the odds they’ll become success stories – and maybe that they’d be chosen by lottery or some other objective system.

Not that success would be guaranteed. But the outcome would doubtless be better than what New Yorkers evidently can expect (at least according to The Times description): token expenditures guided by nothing more than the most fatuous sort of good intentions.

Im-Politic: A Pandemic of Coverups?

Tags

Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, censorship, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, Facebook, Fauci, Fauci emails, Google, Im-Politic, lab leak, Mark Zuckerberg, National Institutes of Health, NationalPulse.com, natural origin, NIH, Peter Daszak, social media, The New York Times, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan lab, Wuhan University, Wuhan virus, Zeynep Tufekci

What a June it’s been so far for anyone who’s always been skeptical of claims that anyone linking the CCP Virus’ emergence to virology facilities in Wuhan was trafficking in fringe-y conspiracy theories. Many crucial pieces of the puzzle are still missing. But June’s developments should make it harder than ever to dismiss not only the possibility that a natural or engineered version of the virus escaped from the lab, but that U.S. public health authorities ignored official prohibitions on funding so-called gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that they and other powerful American institutions even acted to suppress news of their Wuhan connections.

After all, it’s already been a month in which no less than Anthony S. Fauci appeared to emphasize that the virus featured characteristics not normally found in the wild. The longtime head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief science advisor told a New York Times interviewer that

“This is an unusual virus because about a third to 40 percent of the people get no symptoms at all. Yet it’s capable of killing 600,000 Americans. We’ve never had a situation like that where a virus that would be benign or almost half the people or 40 percent of the people and yet kill so many people.”

And this after declaring that

“I’m not an evolutionary virologist, but those who are look at the virus, and they say it’s absolutely totally compatible with something that evolved from bat viruses because of the closeness to. But we don’t have that extra link that’s come in, but there’s nothing they see in there that makes you think it was something that came from a lab.”

Clear as mud, right?

It was also a week in which another New York Times contributor made an observation indicating that even if the the Wuhan Institute of Virology whose research Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) overall helped finance wasn’t engaged in federally prohibited gain-of-function experiments, it still might have created the pathogen in question where none existed before. According to Zeynep Tufekci,

“Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While trying and failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadvertently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s even possible, [Stanford University neurobiologist and bioengineer Michael Lin] told me, that viruses can coexist in a single sample and quietly recombine, giving rise to something novel but undetected.”

In other words, creating the specific SARS-CoV-2 virus that has swept over the world might not have been the goal of the Chinese scientists in question. But this virus might have resulted from their efforts to simulate natural processes. If you or loved ones have suffered from the virus medically, or from the economic and other public health damage it’s caused, this is likely to look like a distinction without a difference. It’s also likely to raise further questions about why U.S. public health agencies funded clearly risky research in a facility they’ve acknowledged they couldn’t monitor adequately.

It’s also been a month in which, thanks in part to that New York Times Fauci interview, more reasons emerged to wonder whether Fauci and social media giants Facebook and Google conspired (yes, the word would be justified in these instances) to suppress reporting on the lab leak theory – in Google’s case because it, too, had helped pay for the Wuhan lab’s work at various times recently.

In January, 2020 – when the CCP Virus was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) – Facebook began a campaign to “keep harmful misinformation about COVID-19 from spreading on our apps” and direct customers “to resources from the WHO and other health authorities through our COVID-19 Information Center and pop-ups on Facebook and Instagram with over 350 million people clicking through to learn more.” Throughout the pandemic period, WHO of course has been a major actor trying to debunk any version of the lab leak theory.

Given Fauci’s own clear interest in drawing public attention away from the possibility that his agency helped create the virus, it’s more than a little interesting that in March of that year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent Fauci an email that the recipient told Times interviewer Kara Swisher, who covers Big Tech, “hey, is there anything that we can do to help out to get the messages out, the right public health messages? I have a very important medium here in Facebook. Can I help? And as a matter of fact, if you guys don’t have enough resources and money to do some of the things you want, just let us know.”

Fauci took Zuckerberg up on his offer but nothing is known about the details of this arrangement because although this email exchange has been made public (with redactions that are odd to say the least since it’s hard to imagine any national security secrets changed hands), the content of follow-up communications (which surely included not only emails but phone conversations) remain under wraps.

Can we all agree that all of this material should be released ASAP, so that we won’t have to accept Fauci’s word that “any thought” that his dealings with Zuckerberg had to do with censoring inconvenient virus-related truths “is total conspiracy theory and total flight of fantasy”? Especially since Facebook didn’t announce until May 26 of this year that “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.” (The company has said nothing about the possibility that the virus escaped a Chinese lab in natural form.)

As for Google, news of its own dodgy CCP Virus-related practices came out on June 9. Shortly thereafter, the company’s own virus and China connection was revealed. A website called TheNationalpulse.com produced proof that Google “funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – a controversial group which has openly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology” on that controversial bat virus research.

Google insists that “The one-off philanthropic grants referenced are years old and had nothing to do with COVID,” and that ‘We have engaged precisely zero times with this organization on any work related to COVID or the Wuhan lab.” But as the National Pulse post showed, one of the studies co-sponsored by Google – from 2018 – described itself “conducted in Guangdong Province, China, to characterize behaviors and perceptions associated with transmission of pathogens with pandemic potential in highly exposed human populations at the animal-human interface….” So it’s easy to conclude that Google also wanted to draw attention away from and discredit the idea that the Institute had anything to do with the pandemic’s outbreak.

Finally, June has been a month when the news came out that in June, 2020, a group of Wuhan University scientists asked the NIH to delete from a key medical genomics database data CCP Virus genome sequences they gathered from patients in that city in January and February.

The scientists claimed their reasons for the request were technical, and no evidence of deceitful intent has appeared. For its part, the NIH says that it receives such requests all the time, and typically complies. Fair enough. But given the importance of such very early pandemic stage information in determining the virus’ origins, and given China’s extensive efforts to keep data from this crucial early pandemic period secret, why on earth didn’t the NIH at least report the request and its response right away? Could it be because of its own funding of virus research in Wuhan?

As I said above, many major pieces of these puzzles remain missing.  But many are now in place also, and if ever there was a subject that screamed out for a comprehensive official investigation of the relevant actions and relationships at least of the U.S. players, with broad subpoena power, you’d think a pandemic that’s killed more than 600,000 Americans and sickened and disrupted or flat-out ruined the lives of tens of millions more amply fits the bill.