JustOneMinute

Drama In DC!

Debt ceilings, government shutdowns, trillions in spending and taxes - AND playoff positions up for grabs in Major League Baseball. Something for everyone.

A Majority Of Republicans HAVE Been Vaccinated

David Leonhardt of the Times:

Red Covid

Covid’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme.

During the early months of Covid-19 vaccinations, several major demographic groups lagged in receiving shots, including Black Americans, Latino Americans and Republican voters.

More recently, the racial gaps — while still existing — have narrowed. The partisan gap, however, continues to be enormous. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 86 percent of Democratic voters had received at least one shot, compared with 60 percent of Republican voters.

The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state:

At one time the Red/Blue divide based on vote share was blurred by Black hesitancy in the (Red) southern states. Headline-grabbing NBA athletes notwithstanding, it has turned out that by and large Blacks were hesitant but persuadable. Hard core Trumpers, not so much.

Leonhardt is interesting on messaging:

How might more conservative Americans be persuaded to get vaccinated?

One intriguing anecdote involves the football team at the University of Mississippi, which is entirely vaccinated even though the state has one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates. Coaches there emphasized the tangible, short-term costs of getting Covid, rather than the more remote chance of death: The players might have to miss a game, and the team might have to forfeit it, if they tested positive.

A related message is duty, Timothy Carney has written in The Washington Examiner. If Carney had refused to get vaccinated, he explained, he would have risked loading more work onto his wife, his colleagues and his partner in teaching Sunday school, as well as forced his children to miss school.

Getting vaccinated to help out your family, friends and community?!? Whoa! This is breakthrough thinking!

 

Saturday Afternoon

Are you ready for some football?!? Or baseball!!!

How about some yard work...

Scandal Watch

Captain Ed Morrissey keeps a weather eye on a couple of scandals the media would rather bury.

First, the Durham indictment of Clinton attorney Sussman may - I say MAY - be the start of something from Durham, finally. The notion that the Russian Collusion scandal was launched as a Hillary dirty trick and carried by sympathizers in the FBI, CIA and mass media is not a story the mass media has been eager to probe.

We all spent a lot of time waiting for Durham. Maybe he has more.

And, in other non-surprises, a Politico reporter is confirming the obvious - the Hunter Biden e-mails financially implicating "the big guy" look legit. Yet another "not in front of the kids" moment of infamy for the media, bith social and mainstream.

Here We Go Again

Are you ready for some football?

On the college side, a weary and divided nation once again wonders - can anyone beat Alabama?

There Are No Adults

I'll say this - if Team Trump had handled the submarine deal with Australia so clumsily we'd be hearing talk of Russian collusion and Impeachment III. And politicizing the science by announcing what the FDA would decide before the data was in? OMG and LOL. And let's not even mention Afghanistan.

I did not expect much from Sleepy Joe but I thought he brought with him an experienced team that had been together for years and could deliver a professional sheen to the operation. Ooops.

When You Have To Deny It...

Probably not helpful:

Justice Amy Coney Barrett argues Supreme Court isn't 'a bunch of partisan hacks'.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In the wake of a controversial decision on abortion rights, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a crowd of more than 100 here that she doesn't believe the highest court in the land is politically driven.

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she told the guests at a Sunday celebration of the 30th anniversary of the opening of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.

Barrett, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020, spent much of her talk at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel arguing the court is defined by "judicial philosophies" rather than personal political views.

"Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties," she said, noting that she identifies as an "originalist" and citing fellow Justice Stephen Breyer as an example of the other main school of thought, "pragmatism."

Yet fifty years of bi-partisan shouting about Democratic judges and Republican judges and here we are.

No word on whether the justices have stopped beating their significant others.

9/11 Twenty Years On

Open thread to get started.

Biden Backpedaling On ATF Chief

Senate to Biden - Send less crazy crazies.

I like these occasional reminders that Biden campaigned as a moderate. Nice to see his Dem colleagues in the Senate remember too.

Gain Of Function, Loss Of Credibility

The Intercept has used the Freedom of Information Act to pry documents from the NIH. The topic is NIH grants to study bat viruses in a partnership of EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some of the "news" is old since the grants were mentioned in already-published studies. But some details ave been added.

Its a bit of a blow to Dr. Fauci's remaining credibility on the question of whether the US funded 'gain-of-function' research conducted by the Chinese. I'll gloomily guess this won't matter - the battle lines around Fauci have been clear for a while and I doubt there are many willing to shift sides. Just to recap, back in May Sen. Rand accused Dr. Fauci of approving gain of function research and Fauci denied it, vehemently. Over time the gist of his defense seem to be, it couldn't be gain of function research because the NIH review board OK'ed it. The BBC and the WaPo explain (I'll come back to the WaPo below.)

Still, here is Caroline Downey at the National Review:

Newly released documents appear to contradict Dr. Anthony Fauci’s repeated claims that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The internal documents detail the work of EcoHealth Alliance, an American research non-profit which used NIH funding to research novel bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. Among the documents, which were obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request, is a previously unpublished EcoHealth Alliance grant proposal filed with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which is run by Fauci.

...

Fauci has repeatedly insisted during his Senate testimony that the research being funded by the NIH at the WIV did not qualify as “gain-of-function” under the NIH’s current definition. But critics, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have accused Fauci of playing semantic games by excluding research which makes bat coronaviruses more transmissible — the commonly accepted definition of “gain-of-function” — from his more convenient definition.

Dr. Richard Ebright, biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, has also disputed Fauci’s claims. Primarily, he has rebutted Fauci’s chief declaration that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV]” as “demonstrably false.”

Ebright told National Review that the NIH-financed work at the WIV “epitomizes” the definition of gain-of-function research, which involves working with “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)” or those pathogens “resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.”

We'll see if these latest revelations move the needle.

BACK TO THE WAPO: They are very intent on defending Fauci and nod along to what I find to be an utterly convincing explanation about gain of function research. The emphasis is on intent rather than results, which seems to me to be beside the point:

Update, May 19: The National Institutes of Health issued a statement to The Fact Checker which in part said: “NIH has never approved any grant to support 'gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans. The research proposed in the EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. grant application sought to understand how bat coronaviruses evolve naturally in the environment to become transmissible to the human population.” When gain-of-function research was paused, “this grant was reviewed again and determined by experts to fall outside the scope of the funding pause.”

The gist of the controversial experiments was to mix and match different segments of different existing bat viruses to see if any of the resulting combinations could be dangerous. Its a fair and relevant questions since bats, and consequently their viruses, tend to co-mingle. But their defense, roughly paraphrased, amounts to 'this is not gain-of-function because we didn't know whether these recombinations would be infectious or not'. C'mon, man. "I wasn't playing with explosives, I was playing with random chemicals and never guessed they'd explode." No Nobel prizes there.

To be fair, the viruses the Chinese have told us about don't look enough like SARS-Cov-2 to be a smoking gun. But have they done undisclosed, unpublished work? Ah, well...

 

Ivermectin Horse Manure

Careful readers often wonder - is it true, or just something I read in the Rolling Stone?

No American Left Behind, Except For A Few

The AP comes for Joe Biden. Gently.

But let's give Tired Old Joe some credit. He can do for Republicans what Trump (and Bush before him) did for the Democrats - let them set aside their differences and unite in their loathing.

Fires Burn Out (Unless They Don't)

The Times ponders a Covid mystery - why have surges faded after about two months?

Has Delta Peaked?

We investigate Covid’s mysterious two-month cycle

By David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu

Has the Delta-fueled Covid-19 surge in the U.S. finally peaked? The number of new daily U.S. cases has risen less over the past week than at any point since June, as you can see in this chart:

 

There is obviously no guarantee that the trend will continue. But there is one big reason to think that it may and that caseloads may even soon decline. Since the pandemic began, Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall. The Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has followed this pattern.

Sadly, there is no particular explanation. And in any case, there is an obvious issue of aggregation - even if Florida and Texas have peaked that does not assure that New England, relatively calm so far, has also peaked.

They serve up some speculation:

Two possible stories

We have asked experts about these two-month cycles, and they acknowledged that they could not explain it. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said.

But two broad categories of explanation seem plausible, the experts say.

One involves the virus itself. Rather than spreading until it has reached every last person, perhaps it spreads in waves that happen to follow a similar timeline. How so? Some people may be especially susceptible to a variant like Delta, and once many of them have been exposed to it, the virus starts to recede — until a new variant causes the cycle to begin again (or until a population approaches herd immunity).

The second plausible explanation involves human behavior. People don’t circulate randomly through the world. They live in social clusters, Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, points out. Perhaps the virus needs about two months to circulate through a typically sized cluster, infecting the most susceptible — and a new wave starts when people break out of their clusters, such as during a holiday. Alternately, people may follow cycles of taking more and then fewer Covid precautions, depending on their level of concern.

Mr. Leonhardt had more at the end of July, including a "Stay Humble" message - since we don't know what's going on its hard to be sure how helpful our various interventions (other than vaccines!) have really been:

A more plausible explanation appears to be that Delta spreads very quickly at first and, for some unknown set of reasons, peters out long before a society has reached herd immunity. As Andy Slavitt, a former Covid adviser to President Biden, told me, “It seems to rip through really fast and infect the people it’s going to infect.” The most counterintuitive idea here is that an outbreak can fade even though many people remain vulnerable to Covid.

That’s not guaranteed to happen everywhere, and there probably will be more variants after Delta. Remember: Covid behaves in mysterious ways. But Americans should not assume that Delta is destined to cause months of rising caseloads. Nor should they assume that a sudden decline, if one starts this summer, fits a tidy narrative that attributes the turnaround to rising vaccination and mask wearing.

“These surges have little to do with what humans do,” Osterholm argues. “Only recently, with vaccines, have we begun to have a real impact.”

I don’t want anyone to think that Osterholm is making a nihilist argument. Human responses do make a difference: Masks and social distancing can slow the spread of the virus, and vaccination can end a pandemic.

The most important step has been the vaccination of many older people. As a result, total British deaths have risen only modestly this summer, while deaths and hospitalizations remain rarer in heavily vaccinated parts of the U.S. than in less vaccinated ones.

But Osterholm’s plea for humility does have policy implications. It argues for prioritizing vaccination over every other strategy. It also reminds us to avoid believing that we can always know which behaviors create risks.

Humility is in short supply these days.