Ed Yong clarifies where the U.S. is in the pandemic

The Atlantic's Ed Yong is credited as "a staff writer" who "covers science". That doesn't do him justice. He's really an acute, clear-eyed observer of not just science but the American political response to the natural world — particularly to CoViD-19.

In a quickie newsletter, he cuts through much of the fog of reporting surrounding the Delta variant. The result is a sober explanation of a few bottom-line facts:

• "Vaccinated people are not fully safe ... but they're much safer than unvaccinated people."
• "Breakthrough infections are relatively rare ... but won't feel rare."
• "Vaccinated people are unlikely to transmit Delta as easily as unvaccinated people ... but they can probably still spread it."
• "We are not back to square one ... but we're not out of the woods."

If you're dissatisfied with the foregoing — if you crave facts that don't leave so much room for interpretation — sorry. That's not how things are.

In a quietly devastating analysis last fall of why the U.S. response to CoViD-19 was so appallingly bad, Yong observed (among many other things) that we have a habit of assuming we can invent our way out of crises. That leads us to seek out, and to expect, magical technological fixes.

My instinct is to call such an expectation simplistic and foolish. However, that's too harsh. Looking for magic bullets bespeaks an optimism that is part of the national character, an optimism that even I must admit is crucial not just for the nation, but for humanity at large.

That said, we often let that optimism blind us to the need to take crucial action before any magic bullets are found. If you don't yet have a cure for zombieism, you'd better do what you can to avoid being turned into one. And you can't rely on just one defense: you have to have multiple layers of defenses, because those zombies will probably overwhelm or circumvent any single obstacle.

Vaccination is not a magic bullet for CoViD-19. It's a key defensive layer, though, just in case you become infected. To minimize the chance of becoming infected, you wear a mask (or masks), stay away from crowds if possible, wash your hands before touching your eyes, etc. — all the things you're tired of hearing about but that remain best practices no matter what you think. Taking all these steps gives defense in depth, which is the best you can hope for in the real world.

So that's where we are. It's neither as great as vaccine proponents hoped nor as dire as some fearmongering pundits think. The world isn't black and white: it's full of grays.

(The 5 August 2021 newsletter is a good summary of where we are, but if you want to know how we botched things as a country so badly, you must read the long piece from last year. He identifies multiple flaws in the national character that will cause us more suffering if we don't recognize and correct them.)

Don't trust Emergent BioSolutions

A few days ago the FDA approved the reopening of the Baltimore facility owned and operated by Emergent BioSolutions that originally was slated to produce large amounts of Johnson & Johnson's CoViD-19 vaccine.

As a reminder of why this matters:

The F.D.A. had halted production at the factory in late March after it was discovered that workers had accidentally contaminated a batch of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine with a key ingredient used in AstraZeneca’s, then made at the same site.

I never got around to posting about Emergent BioSolutions before this but I've followed news of its travails with anger and disgust.

This NYT piece discusses how Emergent came to exploit the federal government's worry over anthrax even as the nation faced shortages of personal protective equipment in the early days of CoViD-19. The company sucked up a lot of money that might have been more productively spent.

Because Emergent was the sole manufacturer of a product deemed critical to national security, the company has played what one former executive described to The Times as “the we’re-going-to-go-bankrupt card.”

Profiteering isn't necessarily a crime but it isn't exactly morally upright, either.

Another NYT piece, "U.S. Bet Big on Covid Vaccine Manufacturer Even as Problems Mounted", revealed yet more damning facts about Emergent.

More than eight years ago, the federal government invested in an insurance policy against vaccine shortages during a pandemic. It paid Emergent BioSolutions, a Maryland biotech firm known for producing anthrax vaccines, to have a factory in Baltimore always at the ready.

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the factory became the main U.S. location for manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines developed by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, churning out about 150 million doses as of last week.

But so far not a single dose has been usable because regulators have not yet certified the factory to allow the vaccines to be distributed to the public. Last week, Emergent said it would destroy up to 15 million doses’ worth of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after contamination with the AstraZeneca vaccine was discovered.

Why and how did the company blunder into this and other disastrous fiascos documented in this article?

... four former company officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements or feared retaliation, described an environment where top Emergent leadership tolerated and even encouraged the flouting of federal standards for manufacturing and marketing products.

One of the former officials said that as the company scrambled to meet the heavy demands of vaccine production, a senior manufacturing supervisor often responded to reports of quality errors by asking: “Do you want me to make drugs or fix issues? I don’t have time to do both.”

This second Times piece is required reading if you want to understand why you shouldn't feel relieved the Baltimore plant is reopening. The story behind its original closure reveals a management team that put profits above quality and responsibility, and a governmental bureaucracy that let the company get away with its recklessness (and make a ton of money in the process) despite being charged with protecting the public.

From the piece about the Baltimore plant's reopening (the first article I referenced):

“The American people should have high expectations of the partners its government chooses to help prepare them for disaster, and we have even higher expectations of ourselves,” Robert Kramer, the chief executive of Emergent, said in a statement on Thursday.

Bullshit. Pardon my French, Kramer, but bullshit.

From that same piece:

Mr. Kramer announced that Sean Kirk, a longtime Emergent executive overseeing manufacturing who went on personal leave earlier this year after regulators found a host of problems at the Baltimore site, would be leaving the company.

Was Kirk solely responsible for the plant's terrible history of mismanagement? The article is silent about that, presumably because Kramer was, too. Emergent hasn't issued a report explaining how its Baltimore plant came to be such a disaster area, and I doubt it ever will of its own accord. In the absence of radical transparency from this outfit, how can we possibly believe, much less trust, that Kirk was the only bad apple?

I sure as hell don't think all the wasted time, money, and other resources were the result of just one executive's misdeeds and inaction. Emergent has a corrupt corporate culture and firing one executive is a laughably inadequate response to this episode.

J & J is assuming oversight of the Baltimore plant but that doesn't mean Emergent BioSolutions shouldn't face a reckoning. The federal government can't let one more penny slip into the company's coffers until there's a public accounting of who did what, and an objective assessment of how the hundreds of millions of dollars Emergent has received was spent. Anybody responsible for squandering that money, including by pocketing it while covering up fraud, has to be held accountable.

Libertarians will be the death of us

A New York Times article describing unvaccinated Americans quotes one fellow who is adamant he will never allow himself to be vaccinated against CoViD-19:

“It has to do with my civil rights,” he said. “The United States government’s main job is to protect me from foreign and domestic enemies. Not my health. I’m in charge of my health.”

First off, I have to note that the article profiles several others before him who are, to varying degrees, more flexible on the subject. In other words, not all unvaccinated people are as adamant as this fellow. Thank goodness for that.

As for this fellow, who, according to the piece, "identifies as more of a libertarian than a Republican", I can only say that he reinforces my exasperation with libertarianism (which I've repeatedly expressed).

Presumably this guy would object to his neighbors contaminating his water by letting their sewage drain into it. Presumably he's grateful for water lines, water treatment plants, and sewers (he lives in Houston so I assume he benefits from them all). These conveniences of modern life don't fall into his tidy little categories of protecting him from "foreign and domestic enemies". Indeed, they are part of protecting his health, something he claims government shouldn't do.

I'm sympathetic to some of the concerns people have over the CoViD-19 vaccines: they were developed in an unprecedentedly short time and we obviously can't yet know if they have any long-term side effects. I think the fact that millions have been vaccinated without widespread bad consequences is good enough real-world evidence that they're safe but your mileage may vary.

But if you're just a stubborn cuss who can't be bothered to think beyond "I ain't letting anybody jab me because freedom", you get no sympathy. You're so obsessed with your favorite buzzword that you have no regard for others. "Freedom" is all about what you want, not about what anyone else might need.

How about thinking about more than yourself for a change?

Start by finding out why it's called public health, not just "health".

"What the Ben & Jerry's Decision Reveals About Israel", Yasmeen Serhan

Yasmeen Serhan's piece in The Atlantic has a thesis I find grim:

While the international community, including the United States, continues to distinguish between Israel and the territories it occupies, the reaction to the Ben & Jerry’s decision has shown that, as far as many Israeli politicians are concerned, that distinction no longer exists.

Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israel-based pollster and political strategist, explained the dynamic to Serhan in greater detail.

Why does Israel care about what an American ice-cream brand thinks of its policies? When I put this question to Scheindlin, she told me that for many Israelis, criticism of Israeli policy is often conflated with an existential threat to Israel itself. To hear many Israeli politicians tell it, “criticism from abroad of our policies is anti-Israel, it’s anti-Zionist, and it’s anti-Jewish, or anti-Semitic,” Scheindlin said. “And that’s really the narrative that we’ve been hearing.”

Serhan notes that while some left-leaning Israeli politicians praised Ben & Jerry's decision, their voices largely have been lost in the tumult raised by centrist and right-wing objections.

I can understand a lot of Israelis not taking kindly to a corporate policy change that explicitly criticizes Israeli policy. However, they should be a lot more careful throwing around that very loaded accusation, "anti-Semitism".

Israel's very existence is a reminder to the world that the ethnic cleansing of Jews during World War II was an abomination that must never happen again. People of good will everywhere can and do support that principle.

However, Israel is also a nation-state, and no nation-state is above criticism. Criticism of the Israeli state is not automatically anti-Semitic. If Israelis can't or won't acknowledge the difference, then Israel risks alienating even its staunchest allies and making "anti-Semitism" meaningless.

Now, it's true that telling someone not to be offended can be presumptuous. I've been on the receiving end of that argument, too, and I'll admit I've called "foul" on more than one occasion when told not to take offense. However, in retrospect, I must admit that I overreacted once or twice.

Take a deep breath, Israelis, especially you politicians lobbing rhetorical artillery fire at Ben & Jerry's. You might not like the company's implied criticism of your national policy but that's all it is: it's not hatred of your identity, it's not anti-Semitism. You conflate policy criticism and anti-Semitism at your own peril.

Let's vaccinate the willing

I sometimes think U.S. media forgets that there's a whole world out there that isn't the U.S.

We're drowning in stories about the unvaccinated all over the country contracting CoViD-19, especially the Delta variant. Many stories are framed as cautionary tales aimed at convincing the vaccine-hesitant to get vaccinated.

It's a worthy cause, in the abstract. It's even a practically useful one, inasmuch as the more unvaccinated hosts there are, the greater the likelihood that (a) breakthrough cases will occur, and, more troublingly, (b) a variant will evolve that is more successful at infecting vaccinated people, diminishing or negating the effectiveness of existing vaccines.

However, this is a worldwide pandemic, and with global travel slowly resuming, dangerous variants can arise anywhere and spread everywhere. While the proportion of vaccinated people in some parts of the U.S. is a lot lower than it ought to be, the proportion of vaccinated people in other parts of the world is even lower.

I fully support getting more, and more accurate, information to those who are genuinely uninformed about CoViD-19 and the vaccines against it. I fully support doing whatever's needed to work around whatever practical obstacles keep people from getting the shot(s), like the inability to take time off work or to get to vaccination sites because of a lack of transportation.

Yet at the same time we have to stop fantasizing that hardcore denialists, like those who think Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. makes sense, will ever get vaccinated. Efforts to reach out to them are a gigantic waste when there are literally billions of people around the world who would be thrilled to be vaccinated.

Right now, we have to prioritize getting the vaccines into the arms of willing recipients, because that will give us the best bang for our buck. Most of those willing recipients live in less affluent countries.

Yes, that means giving up, for the time being, on the idea of herd immunity in the U.S. Guess what? We have to do that anyway! Between the delusions of the ex-domestic Dear Leader, the fanatical irrationality of the existing anti-vaccine crowd, and the readiness of far-right media (traditional and social) to pander to both, we face a brick wall of reality-denial in something like a quarter of the U.S. population.

We have to stop wasting time beating on that brick wall, and redirect our energies to drying up the global supply of unvaccinated people to the fullest extent possible.

Once we've reached the billions of willing vaccine recipients, then we'll be in a position to tackle the truly hardheaded.

Persistent thoughts, July 2021

• Multiple books about the ex-domestic Dear Leader are dropping. The thing is, all the teaser stories are trivial: he was angry at Pence for hiring an ex-Donnie staffer; he complained about the low quality of his lawyers; he spoke favorably of Hitler; etc. Don't get me wrong: for any normal president (or any normal person, for that matter), any of these stories would be valuable, revelatory in all the wrong ways. However, the ex-domestic Dear Leader's reputation is so putrid that these new stories are frankly boring, amounting to inconsequential gossip.

  Publishers who want my dollars will have to commission genuine investigatory works that expose the corruption, incompetence, cruelty, and ignorance of his administration in pitiless detail. Such books take a lot more time and effort than gossipy tell-alls (which are essentially hardcopy clickbait) but a presidency as brazenly corrupt, stunningly incompetent (at doing helpful, useful things), operatically cruel, and pridefully ignorant as the ex-domestic Dear Leader's needs to be chronicled in all its fetid infamy as a warning to future generations.

  I hope and assume that professional journalists and historians are doing the hard, unglamorous work of uncovering the dirty deeds that haven't made the headlines, the dirty deeds that compromised our health (and not just with regard to the pandemic), our environment, our economy, and our national security. We know he did dirty deeds: he would sell out the nation in a heartbeat and there was a small ocean's worth of money sloshing around D.C. during his term, so dirty deeds were done, both by him and on his behalf. We don't know the details, though. And for our own safety, we need to know those details.

• How long can the far-right echo chamber of outrage sustain itself?

  How much money do the rubes who donate to these con artists have?

  How long can those rubes stay mad as hell without bursting a blood vessel?

  How many of them will wind themselves up so thoroughly that they'll engineer their very own mass-casualty incidents, and how many innocents will they take out?

  What will it take for them to ask why they trust the highly unreliable information sources they do?

  If they don't trust people who have spent years exploring a subject, why do they trust some random bozo on social media whose identity they can't determine?

  Some fraction of these folks will never emerge from their cocoons of delusion; the only question is how large a fraction. Already some of them have died of CoViD-19 while denying its very existence with their last breaths. It's tragic for their families and friends, of course, but also for the rest of us, because reality-deniers of all stripes are incompetent to help solve the very large problems humanity faces — and can worsen those problems immeasurably by preventing us from addressing them at all.

SCOTUS screws us again

Prof. Richard Hasen's op-ed piece in the New York Times well summarizes today's Supreme Court decisions' corrosive effect on voting in the U.S. The headline's not an overstatement: "The Supreme Court is Putting Democracy at Risk".

Of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Hasen writes:

Thanks to Brnovich, a state can now assert an interest in preventing fraud to justify a law without proving that fraud is actually a serious risk, but at the same time, minority voters have a high burden: They must show that the state has imposed more than the “usual burdens of voting.” Justice Alito specifically referred to voting laws in effect in 1982 as the benchmark, a period when early and absentee voting were scarce and registration was much more onerous in many states.

It is hard to see what laws would be so burdensome that they would flunk the majority’s lax test.

I don't know why Alito (I can't bring myself to use the title "Justice": the irony is too bitter) decided 1982 was a good year to set as a baseline but I can't say I'm surprised he went back in time nearly forty years. That's his M.O., to take us as far back as he can convince his fellow reactionaries to go.

With Brnovich, SCOTUS has rendered the 1960s-era Voting Rights Act an empty shell.

The other case, Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta, concerned disclosure of donors to charities. The Court significantly reduced the ability of states (or anyone else) to mandate such disclosure, even for law enforcement purposes (e.g., to detect campaign finance violations). Prof. Hasen explains the impact of today's decision:

In the Americans for Prosperity case, [Chief Justice Roberts] redefined the “exacting scrutiny” standard to judge the constitutionality of disclosure laws so that the government must show its law is “narrowly tailored” to an important government interest. This makes it more like strict scrutiny and more likely that disclosure laws will be struck down. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye.”

The court’s ruling calls into question a number of campaign finance disclosure laws. Perhaps even more significant, it also threatens the constitutionality of campaign contribution laws, which are judged under the “exacting scrutiny” standard, too. Lower courts can now find that such laws are not narrowly tailored to prevent corruption or its appearance or do not provide voters with valuable information — two interests the court recognized in the past to justify campaign laws. A requirement to disclose a $200 contribution? A $500 campaign contribution limit? Plaintiffs in future cases are likely to argue that a law targeting small contributions for disclosure or imposing low contribution limits are not “narrowly tailored” enough to deter corruption or give voters valuable information, even if Congress or a state or municipality found such laws necessary.

I'll let Prof. Hasen describe the combined ugly results:

As in Shelby County and in the 2010 Citizens United case, which struck down Congress’s limit on corporate campaign spending, this conservative Supreme Court in today’s rulings shows no deference to democracy-enhancing laws passed by Congress, states or local governments.

...

If you put the Brnovich and Americans for Prosperity cases together, the court is making it easier for states to pass repressive voting laws and easier for undisclosed donors and big money to influence election outcomes.

The wealthy and powerful (but I repeat myself) already had a vastly disproportionate say over our laws and public policies. The U.S. Supreme Court, courtesy of the reactionary Justices who now dominate it, has strengthened that stranglehold.

Inequity of opportunity, wealth, and access to power has driven this country to a brink not seen since the Civil War. Think I'm exaggerating? Look at any objective assessment of the haves and have-nots in American society today — I recommend Robert Reich's The System — and the yawning gulf between them looks a lot like that which precipitated the French Revolution. (And Reich's book was published before the pandemic had really taken hold. Suffice to say, the pandemic didn't invalidate any of his assessments: it reinforced them.)

With these decisions, the Court has guaranteed that the Republicans who represent a minority of the population will reinforce their grip on power. The Court also has guaranteed that more younger voters will be discouraged from participating in elections — indeed, some of them will conclude that "democracy" is a sham, a rigged game, just as the most poisonous and irresponsible voices on the far right are loudly proclaiming (though for entirely different and false reasons).

The far-right majority in Brnovich cloaked their reasoning in concern for election integrity and public trust in the election process. The effect of that decision, and the indirect effect of Americans for Prosperity, will be to diminish both.

From Citizens United onward, this Court has undermined the body politic through its blinkered obsession with safeguarding the rich and powerful. When the history of the United States is someday written, this Court's contribution to the era's disunity and dysfunction — and perhaps to the nation's downfall as a democracy altogether — will be as infamous as doomed Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake".

Let me offer earliest congratulations on cementing your place in history, right-wing Justices.