Author: Nick Bergus

Josh Marshal at Talking Points Memo:

In twenty years of doing this, one thing that strikes me again and again is the critical importance of naming things in politics. If the question is advocacy and persuasion few steps are more important than effectively and consistently naming the key developments, agenda items, threats and prizes and raising them in the public consciousness. There are few things – things that can be controlled by people involved in politics and campaigns, as opposed to the tides of historical change we are awash in – more important for Democrats to do a good job at in the next two years.

Marshal cites “death tax,” but there are so many other examples. “Partial-birth abortion” was a successful rebranding of what doctors call intact dilation and extraction (and became a political focus despite making up just 0.17 percent of abortions). I suspect it’s behind the move from “gun control” to “gun safety”.

We’ve fallen prey to it while trying to mitigate COVID-19 by calling even minimal mitigation or restrictions “lockdown,” “shutdown” and “quarantine” when we still have freedom of movement, many businesses are open just offering services safely and very few people are truly isolating.

Josh Kovensky for Talking Points Memo:

The early warning signs:

1. Three At least 12 states are reporting cuts in their initial allocations of doses.
2. One governor is reporting that the total number of doses projected to be available nationwide has been cut by four million monthly.
3. The vaccine maker reports it is not having production problems and says its has doses in warehouses, but is awaiting direction from the federal government on where to send them.

Vaccines are only useful when people are vaccinated.

I can’t imagine the logistics involved, but I have to imagine it takes attention and planning, neither of which are in the current administration’s wheelhouse.

Andrea May Sahouri and Tony Leys for the Des Moines Register:

The Iowa Department of Public Health announced Wednesday evening that Iowa will receive less COVID-19 vaccine in its initial wave than anticipated — as much as 30% less. […]

Other states will also fail to receive their anticipated volume of vaccine doses as well, the department wrote in the news release. The department did not disclose which states could be affected.

I’m skeptical of the “in the March time period, I think you’ll start seeing more like a flu vaccination campaign,” and this feel like just the beginning of a lot of downward adjustment on vaccination expectations.

Are the high expectations a trap? Human nature? More incompetence? Maybe it’s the truth and it’ll fall along that timeline after all.

Laura Belin rounded up what Iowa elected officials have said:

“Is it time to acknowledge Biden as president-elect?” [Sen. Charles] Grassley dodged: “I don’t have to – the Constitution does.”

Hughes followed up: “And do you acknowledge him as president-elect?” Grassley replied, “I follow the Constitution.”

This is a continuation of Grassley et al. pretending that the Constitution is the beginning and end of the rules and norms they must adhere to. That’s why he blocked Merrick Garland from the Supreme Court under Obama (“A majority of the Senate has decided to fulfill its constitutional role of advice and consent by withholding support for the nomination,” he said) or why he kept voting for unqualified Trump appointees. It’s a form of Originalism but for the legislative branch. And if you strip away interpretations from the Constitution, you can make it fit your raw political motives.

Matthew Yglesias:

Washing your hands is, obviously, a great thing to do in life. But the forget-masks-wash-your-hands era, even if motivated by a concern about medical supplies, carried a larger implication that’s stuck with us — fear dirty things. The correct message should be to fear contaminated air.

Good public messaging is hard, and even harder when you’re dealing with a novel, contagious and deadly virus experts are learning about in the fly. Compound that with motivations driven by supply shortages, and it’s way, way worse.

Incompetence breeds incompetence.

The good news is that poor messaging on ventilation means you don’t have to pay through the nose for an air  purifier.

Noah Weiland and Carl Zimmer for The New York Times:

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group.

The finding is one of several significant new results featured in the briefing materials, which include more than 100 pages of data analyses from the agency and from Pfizer. Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier.

What’s more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer’s race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects.

“This is what an A+ report card looks like for a vaccine,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University

Science is amazing. In this case, it’s given us a 95-percent effective vaccine that seems to work equally well across demographic groups in record time. It’s also given us tons of knowledge about how SARS-CoV-2 transmits and simple ways we can protect ourselves.

There’s an alternate reality where there’s a large mass of people who don’t see their religious beliefs in conflict with science. Instead, they hold up science and the knowledge it gives us as an amazing expression of their god, as a confirmation of the brilliant order of the universe, and our inability to fully understand creation.

Elaine Godfrey for The Atlantic:

Iowa’s problem is not that residents don’t want to do the right thing, or that they have some kind of unique disregard for the health of their neighbors. Instead, they looked to elected leaders they trust to tell them how to navigate this crisis, and those leaders, including Trump and Reynolds, told them they didn’t need to do much at all. (Although some residents have certainly deliberately ignored the advice of public-health experts.)

We have mishandled the pandemic, but I have a quibble with the headline. It should be “How Iowa is Mishandling the Pandemic” because, first, we are very much in it and, second and most frustratingly, we have all the tools we need right now to prevent this death and suffering.

We are left with bad choices, but there are different magnitudes of bad. As one Iowa City healthcare provider put it:

The endgame of uncontrolled spread is a choice between massive death and suffering and overflowing hospitals, or shutting things down. This is the equivalent [of] choosing between death or amputation—when you could have had an earlier surgery, which would have been painful but would have prevented this scenario from developing in the first place.

Matt Taibbi:

In State of Iowa v. Jane Doe, a woman charged in 2009 with domestic abuse had her case dropped, for the sensible reason that she was actually the one being abused.

Upon dismissal, Jane Doe was sent a bill for “unpaid court costs” of $718.38, again involving counsel fees. Nearly a decade later, she tried to get her case expunged (a 2016 law had made this easier), but a district court ruled she could not. Why? She still owed court costs she had never been able to pay in the first place.

In Iowa, it seems, those who see their charges dropped can be subjected to more costs and fines than if they’d been convicted.

Dee Gill on more ambitious testing than anything the United States has tried yet as we await widespread vaccination:

A nationwide COVID-19 screening program that includes quick verification of positive test results would provide economic benefits far beyond its considerable costs, according to new research out of UCLA and Harvard. A two-test protocol could spur economic recovery by greatly reducing the number of people and businesses sidelined by COVID-19–related fears and unnecessary quarantines, as well as lowering actual sickness and death rates.

The study analyzes three hypothetical protocols for federally funded screening programs that test large swaths of the mostly asymptomatic population every 4, 7, 14 or 30 days. Any one of the scenarios would induce GDP growth that generates more than enough additional tax revenue to pay for the testing costs, according to findings detailed in a working paper by UCLA’s Andrew Atkeson and Harvard’s Michael C. Droste, Michael Mina and James H. Stock.

The idea is to pair a cheaper rapid test with a more expensive, more accurate test to shorten quarantines, keep schools open and ease fears.

As the study points out, while there’s good news on the vaccination front, but we still don’t have one approved or in mass production.